Barbara Bates Seminar Series 10.23.24

Rickets in the History of Medicine: Bit Player or “A-Lister”?

Speaker: Christian Warren, PhD, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Date + Time: Wednesday, October 23, 2024, 4:00pm - 5:00pm, EDT

Location: Hybrid; Gershwind & Bennett Family Collaborative Classroom, Holman Biotech Commons, 3610 Hamilton Walk, University of Pennsylvania + Zoom webinar

Register for 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.

Christian Warren is Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Author of the award-winning Brush with Death: a Social History of Lead Poisoning, his research focuses on the cultural history of health and the built environment. His second book, Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency will be published in November 2024. He has written articles in the Journal of Southern History, Business History Review and Public Health Reports, and guest editorials or blog entries in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the American Journal of Public Health, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Washington Post. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University.

Any questions please contact Elisa Stroh at [email protected] or (215) 898-4502.