Vitamin C: More than Just an Antioxidant and Preventing Scurvy

The anti-scurvy properties of oranges and lemons were first reported in 1747 by Dr. John Lind, a ship’s surgeon in the British Royal Navy, in his Treatise on the Scurvy. It took almost two hundred years before ascorbic acid or vitamin C was chemically identified and synthesized in 1933. For this work Szent-Gyorgyi and Walter Norman Haworth shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1937. This vitamin has since been shown to be essential for a number of enzymatic reactions including collagen formation, wound-healing as well as for its antioxidant properties [1].