Stuff You Missed in History Class · iHeartPodcasts

Rickets

January 26, 2026·40 min·3 clips

Archaeologists found a 5,000-year-old skeleton with rickets, the oldest evidence ever discovered.

The paper trail starts with a careful caveat. The first published use of the word rickets appears in the Annual Bill of Mortality of the City of London in 1634, but the bill had only included causes of death for five years. So it looks official, then immediately less tidy. The searchers gathered the information. These elderly matrons often laid out the dead, prepared bodies for burial, and cared for sick people. That gave them practical knowledge, the kind that comes from seeing illness close up. People trusted that experience enough to report it. Still, the limits matter. Most of the women had no formal education and could not read or write, so they spoke their findings to a clerk. No notes survive here explaining how they decided a death was rickets. That makes the 1634 number useful and slippery at once: 14 rickets deaths out of almost 11,000 total deaths in the city. The episode handles it as a clue that the disease was recognizable enough to be named, even though unearthed English medical treatment practices do not mention it before then. Then the term moves into medicine. Daniel Whistler wrote the first known clinical description of rickets in an MD thesis at the University of Leiden, where many people from Britain and Ireland studied medicine. The episode is about reading records with a raised eyebrow: who noticed illness, who got to write it down, and how much uncertainty can sit inside one tidy source.

As heard by us

A careful history of rickets as it first appears in London's death records and early medical writing.

Rickets frames the disease through a paper trail that is useful precisely because it is imperfect. The clearest thread is London in 1634, when the Annual Bill of Mortality listed 14 deaths from rickets out of nearly 11,000 total deaths.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the early paper trail behind rickets, from London's Bills of Mortality to the first clinical description.

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