[gerdesj]

Deploying the scientific method to decide something looks quite obvious to us in these days of Bill Gate's efforts to inject minute sensors into us all under the guise of vaccination or something 8)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37320399 - this is a BBC article about James Lind, who did an experiment in 1747. Not too sure about four ships in 1601 - there are no sources in the link above. Also, he was a Scot, not English. He was of course a Brit too (1707-)

The results probably were reported but they were probably not distributed effectively. Nowadays we have the internet to vilify entire populations, within seconds. Back then, you had to get a pamphlet printed that a few 100 people would read.

"Sailors who ate the ship's rats were inadvertently protecting themselves - as the animal synthesizes its own vitamin C."

So there you go. If you run out of shipmates and lemons: eat the rats!

[thaumasiotes]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lancaster#Scurvy

The navy is not a decentralized organization. Distribution of the results is not a concern.

[gerdesj]

"In 1601 Captain Admiral James Lancaster unintentionally performed an experimental study of lemon juice as a preventive for scurvy."

Unintentionally ...

This is in 1747: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37320399

[thaumasiotes]

The unintentional part was that he had an experimental group and a control group. The experiment itself was not unintentional; he was already aware that the lemon juice should prevent scurvy. That's why the one ship of four that got the lemon juice was the ship he was on.

The fact that the British navy still had no institutional knowledge of scurvy hundreds of years later is the point I'm making. They didn't know how to deal with it despite the fact that a cure had been known for several thousand years, and the navy itself had received James Lancaster's report over a hundred years prior. The navy's behavior reflects nothing other than a very severe failure that would have been trivial to fix at any time.

The adoption barriers that caused the navy to kill thousands upon thousands of its own men over a period of centuries did not reflect any difficulty in preventing scurvy. It was always easy. They reflected the fact that adoption barriers are very large no matter what the context is, and absolutely overwhelming evidence, such as a 100% reduction in the incidence of a disease that ordinarily kills 40% of your manpower, is not enough to bypass them.

The adoption of a practice is at most tenuously related to the effectiveness of a practice. That is not how people adjust their behavior.

What point are you making?