Before it was a punchline for terrible jokes about pirates, scurvy was a very real threat for a very long time. Hippocrates was the first one to be like, "Hey, what's this?" in his day; the ancient Egyptians knew about it, too, and documented its symptoms in hieroglyphics as early as 1550 BCE. At one point, during the three hundred years now known as the Age of Sail, it was assumed that 50% of sailors on any given voyage would perish of the disease. Gums rotted. Teeth fell out. Skin turned sallow. Good men died. Iconic 17th-century explorer Admiral Sir Richard Hawkins called scurvy "the plague of the Sea, and the Spoyle of Mariners." It was... bad.