The Disease of Rickets

The rickets were first know in the West of England, in the counties of Dorset and Somerset.

The rickets appeared first about the year 1620 an afterwards travel into all parts of England. It is an old disease that became epidemic after 1650 when soft coal was introduced as a fuel source.

The origin of the term is uncertain. Suggestion have included English racket – short of breath, and rucken – to rock or reel.

The term ‘rickety’ came to mean ‘shaky or tottering’ because the person so afflicted were impaired in posture and gait.

Rickets might be an Anglicized corruption of the Greek rhachitis, or it might have originated in the Old English ‘wricken’, ‘to twist’.

Whatever origin, the word ‘rickets’; first appears in a Bill of Mortality for 1634 as accounting for fourteen death, the number from that cause increasing year by year until 1659 when surprising figure of 476 out of less than 15,000 burials or 3% of total deaths is recorded.

The first full description of the disease was written in the seventeenth century by the English physician Glisson.

While rickets has a distinguished antiquity, historically, it came to medical attention particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, not appearing in the U.S.A until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

In 1822, a Polish physician observed that children in Warsaw suffered severely from rickets, yet rickets was unheard outside of the city, he concluded that sunbathing was the cure for rickets.

Huldschinsky, in 1919, was the first to prove that exposure of the skin to ultraviolet radiation could cure rickets.

Within two years, Hess and Unger reported that exposure of several rachitic children to sunlight was adequate for curing this bone deforming disease.

Rickets has been recognized in nonhuman primates since ancient times. Rickets have also been found among the skeletons of captive baboon from the dynastic tombs of ancient Egypt.

Perhaps some of the earliest evidence of rickets is to be found in ancient Egyptian wall illustrations, where bow legged individuals are represented.

Some medical authorities have suggested that people described as ‘crook backed’ in the bible had a spinal curvature caused by rickets.

About 130 CE, the noted physician Soranus of Ephesus referred to a disease that caused ‘backbone bending’ and twisted thighs.
The Disease of Rickets