Scurvy is a deficiency disease, arising from a lack of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in the diet. It occurs most characteristically in the absence of fresh fruit and vegetables, but can still be avoided when these are not consumed if the diet is rich in uncooked meat as in the case of Eskimos (heat destroys the vitamin). Scurvy does not appear in a regularly recognizable way in the ancient medical literature, and its name is not classical but, rather, derived from the north European vernaculars of the Renaissance. It was, for example, schverbaujck in Dutch and scorbuck in Danish, and Latinized in 1541 by Johannes Echthius, a Dutch physician living in Cologne, as scorbutus. In the slave trade it was often called the mal de Luanda.

Etiology, Epidemiology, and Distribution

Human beings, like guinea pigs and monkeys but unlike many other animals, do not synthesize vitamin C. No doubt this reflects a period of evolution in a vitamin C–rich environment; and, with the expansion of the species to all parts of the Earth, less generous climates have inevitably taken a toll due to scurvy. The disease occurs where economic, social, or climatic factors prevent access to an appropriate diet, and frequently has appeared under circumstances where diets are circumscribed, including long sea voyages, during military operations, in prisons, with the failure of crops, and during the Gold Rush. In the modern period, infantile scurvy has been a problem, for example, in Canada during the decades 1945–65, where it occurred mostly among the lower socioeconomic groups.