8 young children and old women The disease caused weak bones and deformities including bowed legs curved spines square skulls and poor teeth It also caused people to suffer from swollen joints and abdomens Professor Glisson published his account of the disease However he was not able to identify the cause of the bone deformities and other symptoms For the next 200 years incidents of the disease came and went often aligning with the quality of the food crop Then the Industrial Revolution transformed English society People poured into the cities from the countryside to work They lived in crowded neighborhoods called slums where the soot from factories blocked the sun’s rays A poor diet of primarily white bread and tea was the only food people were able to afford The disease outlined by Glisson now called rickets was common in poor urban children In 1890 it was discovered the disease was more common in places where there was less sunlight Soon doctors were prescribing time in the sun to prevent rickets The underlying cause of rickets however would not be discovered until the 1920s when scientists found a link between vitamin D RICKETS ACROSS THE WORLD Rickets did not only affect children in the impoverished neighborhoods of England’s cities In 1921 rickets affected 75 percent of all infants in New York City 1 The disease continues to be a problem Today children in Africa and parts of tropical Asia suffer from rickets mainly from a lack of calcium in their diets Rickets is also becoming common again in wealthier nations including the United States and European countries Doctors believe this may be due to children spending more time indoors and not producing enough vitamin D through sunlight or from wearing more sunscreen which prevents the sun’s UV rays from penetrating the skin
9 which human bodies produce after receiving sunlight and bone growth The bone deformities and weakness caused by rickets were the results of a lack of vitamin D calcium or phosphate in a child’s diet Exposure to sunlight and eating dairy and Doctors considered rickets which causes bowed legs to be the most common childhood disease in the 1920s
10 green vegetables containing vitamin D can prevent the disease It took scientists and physicians nearly 2,500 years to discover the quality of a person’s diet could prevent this debilitating disease Meatpacking in Manhattan Rickets was not the only nutritional concern in the 1800s In 1884 Mathilde Wendt Mary Trautmann and roughly a dozen other women living in the Beekman Hill neighborhood of New York City were angry Various meat industries were fouling the air and streets near their homes They established the Ladies Health Protective Association and began conducting their own inspections of offending slaughterhouses What they witnessed turned even their strong stomachs Slaughterhouse floors were covered in dried blood from the slaughtering process Unusable animal parts rotted while fresh meat was thrown on top of them The women confronted the slaughterhouse owners about these unsanitary conditions When owners did not make changes the women demonstrated outside their facilities and UNRECOGNIZED EFFORTS Though modern historians give the Ladies Health Protective Association credit for calling attention to the poor conditions in Manhattan slaughterhouses their work went largely unnoticed when they were active In 1891 The Illustrated American explained So quietly and expeditiously have the reforms been wrought that the ladies are known little to the general public and yet the mayor the comptroller and the president of the Board of Health give frequent and courteous audience to this group of women 2
11 complained before the city’s Board of Health An 1891 issue of The Illustrated American magazine described the women’s persistence In every case the outrage against the public good-health was carefully investigated by the Ladies Health Protective Association and the fact of existing evil was brought before the Board of Health 3 The tireless work of the women in the Ladies Health Protective Association helped create more sanitary slaughterhouse conditions and improved food safety After the Ladies Health Protective Association raised awareness of the issue inspectors began checking meat and conditions in slaughterhouses in the early 1900s
