Time & Perspective Quote by James Lind

The driest sentence here hides a quietly radical move: Lind is talking like a man watching tradition lose an argument in real time. “It was indeed not very sound” reads like a polite British understatement, but it’s also a scalpel. He’s signaling that the prevailing treatments for scurvy (the “different courses”) weren’t just ineffective; they were medically incoherent. Then he pivots to the only thing that matters: who actually got better.

The phrasing “those who had taken it” makes the experiment sound almost accidental, as if recovery surprised him as much as anyone. That’s the subtext of an 18th-century scientist working inside a world where medicine still mixed habit, hierarchy, and guesswork. Lind can’t yet say “vitamin C,” can’t fully explain mechanism, and doesn’t need to. He points to outcomes over theories, letting comparative improvement do the persuasion.

The “fortnight” detail is doing heavy lifting. It’s a clock put on suffering, turning sailors’ misery into measurable time. The exception clause - “except the oranges” - is the tell. Oranges worked fast enough to disrupt the protocol. The experiment’s rules bend around efficacy, not the other way around.

Contextually, this is naval medicine under empire: scurvy was a strategic liability, not an abstract ailment. Lind’s intent is practical and insurgent: replace inherited remedies with controlled observation. His restraint is rhetorical strategy. By sounding modest, he makes the data harder to dismiss.