Stephen Aldridge
Using Evidence to End Homelessness,
04/2020
Book Chapter
Humans are not good at acting on what they already know. As early as 1601, Captain Admiral James Lancaster of the East India Company stumbled on the fact that lemon juice provided an effective prevention against scurvy.¹ By the middle of the 18th century, James Lind, a naval physician, was putting that information to the test in the first recorded randomised control trial (RCT).
Lind took 12 men suffering from the symptoms of scurvy and divided them into six pairs, treating each with one of a selection of recommended but untested remedies borrowed from other physicians. These included daily doses
