ABSTRACT
Before vitamin D was discovered, a widely held concept was that rickets and infection were related. Children, with rickets as the manifestation of their vitamin D deciency, suffered from the common infectious maladies of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, namely, tuberculosis, pneumonia, dysentery, and severe measles (Park 1923). The rachitic lung was listed as one of the clinical features of rickets (Khajavi and Amirhakimi 1977). In a severe form of rickets leading to inanition and death, children often succumbed to serious infections (Chesney 2010). Indeed, rickets was felt by many child health professionals to be the result of infection (Jenner 1895).
