Introduction Rickets has long been of interest in Britain, since the original monographs of Whistler and of Glisson, Bate and Regemorter. Both of those works were in Latin but Whistler rapidly had an English translation made which shows that the title of his thesis was 'Inaugural Medical Disputation of the Children's Disease of the English which the inhabitants idiomatically called 'the rickets', which, God aiding him, Daniel Whistler, Eastern Anglo-Saxon, with the authority of the most noble and magnificent rector Dr Johannes Polyander a Kerkchoven, doctor of Holy Theology and Principle Professor of the same faculty in the illustrious Academy of Leyden in Holland propounds there for dispute for the Degree of Doctor and its entailed high privileges in Medicine on the 18th day of October at the accustomed time and place'. His thesis was printed in 1645, a few years before Glisson's book (1650), but even so