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Explanation
The Joke
The comic depicts a group of pirates on a ship. One pirate announces "Wait! There! I've a headache!" as if spotting something exciting on the horizon. Another pirate responds with the completely reasonable advice "So there, man! Go and check ye medical website!" The first pirate then confesses he has already looked it up, and in the final panel, another pirate wearily remarks "Aaah, it's always the scurvy with these things," implying the medical website diagnosed him with something dire or predictable -- much like how modern medical websites (like WebMD) notoriously lead every symptom search to a terrifying diagnosis.
The joke transplants a very modern experience -- the anxiety spiral of Googling your symptoms on medical websites -- into a pirate setting, where the "worst case scenario" diagnosis is always scurvy. This is a parody of how sites like WebMD are famous for turning any minor symptom (a headache, a cough, a sore knee) into a catastrophic disease. For pirates, the equivalent catch-all terrifying diagnosis is scurvy, which is both historically accurate (it was rampant among sailors) and humorously mundane compared to the cancers and rare diseases that modern symptom-checkers tend to suggest.
The Humor
The humor works on multiple levels. First, there is the inherent absurdity of pirates using a "medical website," blending the Age of Sail with internet culture. Second, the punchline lands because it mirrors a universally relatable modern experience -- we have all fallen down the WebMD rabbit hole and convinced ourselves a headache means something catastrophic. By making the answer "scurvy" every time, the comic both satirizes the medical website phenomenon and plays on the historical reality that scurvy genuinely was the answer to most ailments at sea. The pirate setting makes the joke feel fresh while the underlying observation remains sharply familiar.
References
WebMD and similar online symptom-checker tools are frequently mocked in internet culture for their tendency to suggest worst-case diagnoses for minor symptoms. Scurvy, caused by vitamin C deficiency, was historically one of the most common and deadly diseases among sailors on long voyages.