Rickets in the History of Medicine: Bit Player or “A-Lister”?
The history of rickets is deeply intertwined with the emergence of modern medicine. This talk with Christian Warren, PhD, will demonstrate that, time and again, rickets was a player in important chapters of that drama.
This public seminar is in a hybrid format. RSVP is required for attending in-person or for receiving a link for virtual attendance.
Hosted by: Bates Center
About the Seminar
The history of rickets is deeply intertwined with the emergence of modern medicine. This talk will demonstrate that, time and again, rickets was a player in important chapters of that drama. Some of these roles will seem natural: the bowed legs of rickets survivors provided clinical material for the first generations of pediatric orthopedists; the search for the causes of rickets enmeshed it in the development of nutrition science, as well as the long history of health and the built environment. Other parts rickets played were less obvious if just as consequential. For example, the skeletal aftereffects of childhood rickets were a major factor in the rise of modern obstetrics, from the gradual takeover of midwifery by male physicians in the eighteenth century to America’s reliance on cesarean delivery in the twentieth.
Rickets is also entangled with the history of medical ethics. Thomas Percival, a founding theorist of modern medical ethics, reported ethical studies on rickety children in his Manchester infirmary clinic in the late 1700s; 130 years later American physicians ignored the basic principles of medical ethics in experiments to test cures for rickets. If rickets shared in the glory of medicine’s fabled rise to a “golden age” of miracle cures, so too was it embroiled in the controversies and uncertainties that trouble today’s wary and weary medical culture.