How “Asian rickets” pathologised British South Asians
Bivins shows elite UK metabolic units and DHSS education-only policy treated rickets in Commonwealth immigrants as a cultural/racial problem to be cured by assimilation.
Source
"The English disease" or "Asian rickets"? Medical responses to postcolonial immigration
Inspect source passages
How “Asian rickets” pathologised British South Asians
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
Manchester Royal Infirmary opened a Metabolic Unit in 1963 with a £30,000 Wellcome grant.
In 1963, the prestigious Manchester Royal Infirmary took the major step of opening a new Metabolic Unit, built with a £30,000 grant from the Wellcome Fund.
Glasgow’s Stop Rickets campaign is dated 1981.
And like these attitudes, rickets also remained in Britain’s Asian communities, despite much-increased outreach and education efforts like Glasgow’s “Stop Rickets” campaign of 1981: “In spite of the extensive medical, social and political attention this condition has received . . . vitamin D deficiency continues to persist in certain Asians in a clinically florid fashion.
What they did
Using MRC/DHSS correspondence, COMA files, Lancet/BMJ language, and Manchester and Middlesex research records—set beside 1920s colonial osteomalacia work in India—she follows rickets from wartime fortification through 1960s–80s “Asian rickets” debates.
What they found
Postcolonial bodies were co-opted for vitamin D biochemistry (Manchester Metabolic Unit, 1963; chapatti-flour pilots) while government refused national flour fortification, citing hypercalcaemia fears and “cultural” resistance. Journals normalised “Asian Rickets”; assimilation and “dusky skin” explanations crowded out housing and poverty.
The limits
What it doesn't show
It is not a prevalence survey of today’s vitamin D deficiency and does not recover every local Stop Rickets clinic; some colonial-era passages in the digitised text are fragmentary.
Key terms
- Asian rickets
- Medical-press label, into the 1980s, for vitamin D deficiency in British South Asians.
- Hypercalcaemia
- 1950s iatrogenic excess calcium linked to heavy wartime vitamin D fortification, used to justify later cuts.
- COMA
- Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy, which preferred education over chapatti-flour fortification.
- Chapatti flour
- Proposed vehicle for targeted vitamin D fortification, never nationally mandated.
- Postcolonial medicine
- Bivins’s frame for metropolitan research that reused colonial labour divisions on immigrant bodies.
Flashcards
0 of 10 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
Bivins’s central frame is:
Common questions
What wartime lesson did DHSS not repeat for Asians?
Mandatory staple fortification and mass nutrition education used when rickets hit the white population.
What 1950s disease justified cutting fortification?
Infantile hypercalcaemia.
What MRC intake figure guided 1950s cuts?
400 i.u. of vitamin D from all sources.
What 1981 Glasgow campaign is cited?
Stop Rickets.
More on Race & medicine