The Inhuman Condition

Even as a drone hovered above to get this shot, a large male polar bear that photographer Martin Gregus, Jr., calls Scar never stirred in this bed of fireweed. Gregus says he named many of the bears in hopes it would help people relate to them as individuals needing protection.

The main physical symptom of scurvy is the disintegration of the body. The skin begins to break. It starts with little blood blisters and develops into full-scale ulcers. The gums begin to putrefy and become black. Bones that had previously broken rebreak. Old wounds open up.

This is because one of the major effects of scurvy is that the body can no longer produce collagen, the glue of the body’s cells. The cartilage, especially around the thorax, begins to disappear. That’s why people who had scurvy creaked and rattled.

The psychological facts were caused by the disintegration of the nervous structure of the brain. The function of vitamin C is to scavenge free radicals, which are what you could call the waste matter of neuronal activity in the brain, which causes oxidation. Oxidative stress occurs when there isn’t enough vitamin C to get rid of the free radicals which are, in effect, blocking the synapses, destroying the effectiveness of the neurotransmitters or causing them to operate in intermittent and explosive ways. And when the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine don’t function properly, the brain starts producing hallucinations.

Dreams become very vivid. And what these dreams produce is an image so exact, and brilliant, of what the body needs: namely, food. When you wake up, or when the hallucination disappears, and you find the food is not there, you are totally devastated. Thomas Willis, an expert on scurvy in the 17th century, called it “a falling down of the whole soul.”

You call scurvy “the disease of discovery.” Map out its causes and the scale of its ravages in the great sea voyages of the 15th to 18th centuries. An estimated two million seamen died of scurvy during those years.