Johann Bachstrom - Leiden and Treatise On Scurvy

Leiden and Treatise On Scurvy

He may have gone directly to Leiden, from where his studies appeared from the early 1730s. Many of his opinions appear common sense but ahead of his time. For example, he promoted that women should be allowed to become medical doctors and that sailors should be taught to swim before taking off to sea. Most famously, he urged the use of fresh fruit and vegetables to cure scurvy. In his 1734 book Observationes circa scorbutum ("Observations on Scurvy"), he wrote that:-

"scurvy is solely owing to a total abstinence from fresh vegetable food, and greens; which is alone the primary cause of the disease."

This publication preceded James Lind's celebrated experiment on scurvy by 13 years and Lind's publication A treatise of the scurvy by 19 years, and he has been called "the one light of the era who, more than any other writer for centuries before or decades after, truly understood scurvy as a deficiency disease." Bachstrom's book probably was dismissed in its time as it did not fit in the then prevailing holistic views in medicine, which sought to explain all diseases by a single theory and to cure them by a universal cure.