Race & medicine
How “Asian rickets” pathologised British South Asians
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Elite UK units and DHSS education-only policy treated rickets in Commonwealth immigrants as a cultural/racial problem to be cured by assimilation.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Official and institutional correspondence reveals the politics behind a public outcome. GSA committee papers and correspondence show controversy pushing the 1976 Resolution on race and IQ toward impartiality rather than rebuke. Unpublished WHO correspondence, read with rival memoirs by Arita and Henderson, recovers pre-1967 smallpox campaigns that the 1980 celebrations left out. MRC and DHSS correspondence shows government refusing national flour fortification for rickets while citing hypercalcaemia fears and cultural resistance.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Correspondence is rarely used on its own. Hay reads GP letters together with oral histories of women seeking the Pill; Bivins sets MRC/DHSS correspondence beside the language of the Lancet and BMJ and research unit records; the Lea study reads letters against asylum practice at Valkenberg and Robben Island and against case notes. The letters carry the argument only when triangulated.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Discoveries this paper informs or conflicts with
- It was called Asian rickets, and the flour stayed unfortified
This paper informs this development.
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.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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