&gt; <i>But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost</i><p>Shit got lost in the olden days! No Google, no Wikipedia ...<p>Mozart only learned about J. S. Bach a few years before his death. Amazingly, he spent his entire career ignorant about the important works of his great predecessor.<p>Today, thanks to modern information technology, the only professionals who remain ignorant about prior work in their field are software developers.