Eating Too Much Rice Almost Doomed Japan's Imperial Navy
My favorite part was on the last page, which I’ll include below as I assume most won’t read to the end.After 4,000 people died in the army from beriberi, the navy, which had eradicated the disease with better diet, criticized the army’s resistance to changing their diet. The article says:‘Under attack by navy doctors, the Army Medical Bureau struck back with an article published under a pseudonym. “The army does not need traditional medicine, statistical speculation or 1,890-year-old theories to solve its beriberi problem,” the article stated. “It needs scientific knowledge based on experimental medicine.”’After this, 26,000 more army men died from beriberi before the Emperor forced them to add barley to their rice...As wonderful as scientific knowledge from experimental medicine is and has been, it seems this sort of belligerence towards pre-scientific human knowledge causes enormous damage that we’re still continuing to reckon with over a hundred years later. While ineffective traditional knowledge has caused plenty of unnecessary suffering too, it is often unwise to dismiss purely on the basis of having not yet been investigated with modern scientific rigor.