The book (PDF) is available from here.
It appears to be someone who decided to prove you can, in fact, survive on sea water - and then did it. Looks like a fascinating little book!
This is very interesting, while not having any real medical education at all I figured the problem with sea water was one of concentration since drinking water has more trace minerals in it than distilled water.
After skimming the first few chapters of this it’s not as straightforward as I wished it were and somewhat implausible to implement for the random shipwreck victim. He only drinks the amount of sea water that contains the daily limit of salt, about 1.5 pints (the fact that this book was written before the metric system makes all the numbers difficult to digest even for an American), and the rest he obtains by juicing fresh water out of fish that he catches. By his calculations he has about 5 days to figure out how to catch several pounds of fish per day before the limited hydration starts killing him.
It’d be interesting to revisit this concept with modern measurements and monitoring of a person’s health.
Not to mention a modern understanding of how many few fish there really are in the sea anymore… :-/
And that’s why we need bigger and bigger boats and nets to keep the fishing output constant! 
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