Introduction

Sailors, spending long time in the sea, use to dy because of scurvy and vitamin C deficiency . Dr Lind,A British naval surgeon (1739–48) and a physician at the Haslar Hospital for men of the Royal Navye, had the idea to investigate wether a special diet could prevent the disease. This was one of the first successfull trials in the history of medicine. Indeed , physiopathology and clinical trials are intimately connected as we are going to discover in this introduction