![]() Without antibiotics, which wouldn't be discovered for decades, tubercular pneumonia is likely to spread aboard Terror and Erebus. Highly contagious tuberculosis remains a problem for the crew, as does pneumonia, which is a lung inflammation rather than a disease itself. ![]() So while the officers and sailors of The Terror fear it, their daily shots of lemon juice make scurvy an unlikely culprit in expedition deaths, especially now that a monster is prowling around the frozen ships. It wasn't until 1932 that a connection between scurvy and the vitamin C in ascorbic acid was finally established.Įven Antarctic expeditions in the 1900s, such as this one lead by Robert Falcon Scott, may have suffered from scurvy after opting for a diet of tinned pemmican. ![]() ![]() Reversion to old superstitions led to shipboard scurvy deaths into the 20th century, including latter-day Antarctic expeditions. Most dangerously, the adoption of key lime juice, lower in vitamin C, combined with vitamin-draining storage methods, threatened to upend Lind's theory entirely. Since no one knew why citrus cured scurvy, there were many setbacks to its widespread use. The daily ration of lemon juice given to British sailors (as seen in The Terror), nearly eliminated scurvy and, as Harri Hemilä of Finland's Department of Public Health documents, likely contributed to major British naval victories over scurvy-ridden enemies, including their defeat of the French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Lind's conclusion was contested for years (the president of the Royal Society preferred wort of malt), but finally adopted by the Royal Navy in 1795. He was not the first to discover the treatment, though he did lift it above centuries-old sailor folklore. After testing popular sailor remedies, including vinegar and sea water, Lind found that administering oranges and lemons cleared up scurvy within a week. Scottish physician James Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753, which not only narrowed down a more precise definition of a disease that had become for sailors a catch-all of boogeyman symptoms, but also announced a cure, discovered by Lind while treating scorbutic sailors in the Royal Navy. While many onboard Terror and Erebus feared scurvy, the disease was nearly licked by the time the crews set out. Tuberculosis was less a shipboard malady than a commonplace cause of death at the time, with nearly one-in-four deaths in England caused by TB, a bacterial infection, usually of the lungs, resulting in severe weight loss and a chronic, blood-mucus cough.Ī wood-engraved illustration of shipboard death for an 1876 edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Gustav Doré Doesn't always attack the lungs," the doctor reports, using the 19th century term for tuberculosis and describing a tubercular variation known as Pott disease. But if I were to wager a guess at this point, I'd say the patient's consumptive. "Though I see nothing to mark it as such, I can't rule it out. The shipboard doctor in The Terror comes to a similar conclusion. Archaeologists exhumed and autopsied the sailors buried on Beechey in 1984, concluding they likely died of pneumonia or tuberculosis. Like much of The Terror and it's source novel by Dan Simmons), the facts of the fictional story hew closely to the real-world events. The first episode of The Terror references three sailors already lost to disease, buried on Beechey Island. And it's just one of the horrific diseases that could strike down a sailor or an entire expedition. But soon, more devastating symptoms emerge, including spontaneous bleeding, swelling and the disease's hallmark symptom: gum ulceration and, eventually, tooth loss. Sailors with scurvy are exhausted, anemic and have aching limbs. It's meant to remind cinema-savvy viewers of Alien, but for the officers of the expedition's two ships, Erebus and Terror, the young sailor's sudden sickness evokes something more terrifying, something so dangerous Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) won't even say the word aloud: scurvy. While debating the proper naval rank to assign the shipboard dog, David (Alfie Kingsnorth) begins spewing blood on the table. In the first episode of The Terror, "Go for Broke," the men of the Franklin Expedition aren't worried about polar bear-like monsters, they're worried about disease.
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