Scott and Scurvy (2010) (opens in new tab)

I suspect scurvy in particular is an unusually poor model of Chesterton's fence. There were centuries of incredibly stupid ideas before the use of lemons came along, and the benefits of lemons were not obvious, or other nations would have adopted the practice. Blindly keeping with tradition would have helped only in the switch from lemon juice to lime- indeed, when the evidence suggested lime juice didn't work they were right to question it! If anything their error was failing to do more thorough tests of novel ideas. Every error was blundered into because they didn't have any real idea of the underlying mechanism.

That's not to to say that cultural evolution doesn't happen, but the relationship between vitamin-c and scurvy just happened to be extremely hard to work out.