An experimental investigation on rickets : two lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England / by Edward Mellanby.

  • Edward Mellanby
Date:
1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An experimental investigation on rickets : two lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England / by Edward Mellanby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    detrimental Jiibestigatictt ON RICKETS. LECTURE I. Haying described in the first two lectures of this course the experimental results obtained in a Research on Alcohol for the Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic), I propose in the next lectures to deal with another social evil—rickets— and to give an account of an experimental investigation made for the Medical Research Committee with the object of finding the essential cause of this disease. The Serious Results of Rickets. It is but little realised how great and how widespread is the part played by rickets in civilised communities. If the matter ended with bony deformities obvious to the eye it would be bad enough, but investigations have demonstrated that such deformities only represent a small part of the cases affected. Schmorl’s histological investigations on children dying before the age of 4 years showed that 90 per cent, had had rickets. Again, Lawson Dick’s examination of the children in London County Council schools, and more particularly the examination of their teeth, led him to state that 80 per cent, of such children had had rickets. The relation between rickets and defective teeth has been placed on an experimental basis recently by the work of my wife,1 and there can be little doubt that any remedy which would exclude the one would almost certainly improve and might eradicate the other. The rachitic child, in fact, carries the stigma of the disease throughout life in the form of defective teeth. Nor is this the most serious part of the evil, for the reduced resistance to other diseases of the rachitic child
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