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.
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?