James Lind ran the trial on HMS Salisbury in 1747. Twelve sailors sick with scurvy, six pairs, six different remedies. The pair that drew oranges and a lemon walked off the ship inside a week. Lind published the Treatise in 1753.

The Admiralty waited until 1795 to put lemon juice in the standard ration. Forty-two years. Cook was writing back from the Pacific the whole time that sauerkraut and fresh greens kept his crews alive. The Sick and Hurt Board read the dispatches and filed them under anecdote.

Ignorance was not the gate. Lind himself listed four theories of why citrus worked, none of them correct. He recommended boiling the juice into rob, which destroyed the active compound nobody could yet name. Ascorbic acid waited until 1932 to be isolated. The mechanism the Board demanded before clearing the dispatch arrived a hundred and eighty-five years after the trial closed.

The institution that demanded a sealed theory before acting on a result already on the deck buried tens of thousands of able-bodied seamen, every one of them avoidable on the date Lind discharged the Salisbury crew.