Christian Warren's "Starved for Light"

Christian Warren is professor of history at Brooklyn College. He is the author of Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Starved for Light follows conversations between researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the corporate and institutional funders of a recent clinical trial testing vitamin D-fortified evaporated milk as an “agent for the cure of rickets in negro infants.” The Carnation Milk Company was pleased with the research; in fact they had started promoting the special milk on their national radio program, the Carnation “Contented Hour.” Now they wanted additional research undertaken “with white children to see what the susceptibility of the dominant race is when compared with the colored race.” They went as far as to specify that “all babies used are to be white babies even omitting any that are Italian.” This new study was different from the first one in important ways. First, it sought to test only prevention, not cure; and unlike the first study, the subjects were not placed in a dark ward and given no rickets preventive foods, conditions sure to induce rickets. While in the new study most of the infants were kept in darkness, all received one of two vitamin D-fortified milks (whole fluid or evaporated). The study found that both milks prevented rickets; it was extended in time and space, morphing into a multi-ethnic out-patient study of dozens of infants.

This page comes at a climactic point of two chapters focusing on “The Science of Rickets.” It presents evidence for three topics that are central to the book: the presumed importance of race in understanding rickets; the interaction between “pure scientists” and commercial interests; and the ethical lapses they made in conducting their research. I think this page would be tantalizing to browsers, who might want to know more about the experiment mentioned here, which never would have been permitted just decades later, under the Nuremberg Code.

However, reading this page alone might give the false impression that Starved for Light’s focus is on clinical or laboratory science, when in fact its scope is far wider, examining the vitamin’s role in evolution, the role of such factors as climate, urbanization and migration in producing vitamin D deficiency; and the role rickets played in important developments in medical history, from obstetrics to orthopedics, nutrition science and experimental ethics. Early chapters explore rickets’ burden in the cities of Europe during the Industrial Revolution and in the slave quarters of the Cotton South. It also takes a light-hearted approach to the serious business of providing anti-rickets agents, from foul-tasting cod liver oil of old, to irradiated milk and UV lamps, to today’s Flintstone’s vitamin gummies and—old things new again, “Artisan Extra-Virgin Cod Liver Oil!”

Learn more about Starved for Light at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue