Pcrh has already linked it below, but it's worth comparing this to the fascinating "Scott and Scurvy"[1], a similar article about scurvy, and how the widely-kno

Pcrh has already linked it below, but it's worth comparing this to the fascinating "Scott and Scurvy"[1], a similar article about scurvy, and how the widely-known citrus cure became "lost knowledge" for a while. The general stroke of "Here's an empirical cure that people won't use because they have a differing theory (that this deficiency disease is actually due to infectious agents)" is of course similar. But the beriberi story seems more just like people foolishly ignoring an empirical cure due to, well, having a contradicting theory; it doesn't seem to have the same component of "here's a series of coincidences that seems to undermine the empirical evidence for the cure in the first place". Also, note that while Takaki correctly identified beriberi as a deficiency disease, he misidentified it as a protein deficiency! Yet his cure still worked well enough, when he could get people to follow it -- which, note, was on top of the difficulty of getting it officially implemented. That's another difference -- if there was any problem getting individual sailors to drink their lemon juice once the British navy started serving it, Cegłowski doesn't mention it. [1]http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm