ABSTRACT
By tracing responses to, and interpretations of, rickets in Britain over the course of the twentieth century, this chapter explains the condition at the nexus between changing models of public health and individual responsibility and imperial and post-imperial identities. It argues that wartime and post-war research combining colonial observation with metropolitan biochemistry integrated these two models successfully to locate rickets' aetiology in 'culture'. Interwar anxieties about the meaning, as well as the physical effects, of rickets – its status as an entirely preventable and easily treatable 'disease of the slums', and thus as a metric of failures in social equity – meant that its prevention loomed large in the minds of Britain's wartime food planners. Worried civil servants and politicians re-inscribed such rickets as a 'tropical' disease, while frantically resisting claims that a new 'epidemic' of 'biochemical rickets' invisibly afflicted the children of the indigenous poor.
