Accessibility and Archives: “thanks be to God she came now to be well married”

In this post, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on disability owing to rickets and the need to think about the past with more than one model of disability.

Although the impact of rickets has been found, osteologically, in remains from as long ago as the British Neolithic, the chances are – if you have heard of it at all – that this agent of disablement is particularly associated in your mind with Victorian industrial poverty.  Between 1881 and 1884, for example, the geologist James Thomson was surveying its prevalence.  Using a somewhat unscientific sampling method (observing children in the street), he determined that in some of the poorest streets of Glasgow, 1 in 2.5 children were “deformed”.     

Rickets as a name was “newly devised” in the 17th century when physicians had agreed that it was a new disease worthy of their analysis that was causing malformed limbs (and death) in English children.  But, as already mentioned, it was absolutely not new.  Perhaps the novelty lay in the number of those affected: Sir John Floyer described it as “almost epidemical, few families escaping it.”  What might cause surprise now is that he goes on to add, “especially those that were rich and opulent and put their children out to nurse”. Naturally, it was convenient (for men) to blame the careless ignorance of lower status women: the saying that “no child has the rickets but he has a dirty slut for his nurse”, could imply imagined faults in both hygiene and morality.  There were also concerns about weaning and the feeding of the infant, and the restriction of the growing body by tightly wrapping it for portability (and preventing limb exercise).

A peculiar 1661 text implicitly linked the novelty to the troubled times of civil war.  The title prophesied (erringly) that “the REKETS after a while shall seize on no more children but quite VANISH through the MERCY of G0D, and by MEANS of K.CHARLES II.”  The author’s perspective is theological rather than medical, but it is still of interest in demonstrating how people of the time thought the disease manifested: symptoms include a disproportionately large head, loose and rotten teeth, crooked arms and legs (the latter often creating mobility difficulties), and restricted growth. 

In 1773, William Farrer noted that “nothing more effectually contributes to the production of this disorder, than an air which is cold, cloudy, and impregnated with various hurtful exhalations” such as the “mists of sea-coal smoke” afflicting Early Modern Londoners.  Climate change, in terms of the harsher winters of the Little Ice Age may have further contributed to the death toll, by demanding people wrapped up (minimising skin exposure to daylight in the darkest months).  An 1817 publication notes: “This disease seldom proves fatal, unless fever and consumption of the lungs supervene: but after the fourth or sixth year the child generally gains strength, and the bones of the legs, though very crooked, often become straight as it grows up”.  Farrer too had distinguished between those who developed rickets before walking (the crookedness of the legs making that more difficult) and after attaining that stage of development.  Here, the disease would manifest as “a slow, infirm manner of walking, a falling forwards, and an instability which terminates in a perpetual desire of sitting”. 

The quotation in the blog title is drawn from the autobiographical writings[i] of the Countess of Pembroke (Anne Clifford, subsequently Saville and Herbert).  The first part of the sentence commented that her granddaughter (Frances Tufton now marrying Henry Drax) had “been once or twice to the Low Countries for the cure of the rickets”.  It has been suggested that Frances’ treatment in Utrecht could have involved cold baths.  Reading between the lines, we could interpret the Countess as suggesting a degree of surprise that her granddaughter had survived long enough to attain to this new state.  However, where causes of death have been linked to baptism records, death from rickets seems generally to have come before the age of five. 

Following Frances’ death in childbirth, her sister in law wrote that an autopsy showed “her backbone was so bowed,.. it was impossible to make passage as much as a limb of the child.”  Although that particular anatomical detail may not have been known beforehand, that does not mean her disability had been completely invisible (even if women’s attire might better disguise bowed legs than that of a prince or king).  Thus, Anne Clifford’s words could instead be read as surprise that Frances’ physical appearance (and pain) had not been off-putting to all suitors.  Unusually for the period, her husband is reported to have “held one of her knees in her greatest torment”.

The childhood difficulties of the future King Charles I have also been attributed by Purkiss (among others) to rickets[ii].  His wife’s grandmother (Joanna of Austria) who had multiple skeletal ‘abnormalities’ (but nonetheless gave birth to eight children) was buried in a family vault with nine Medici princes (six of whom had rickets) and her mother-in-law Eleonora of Toledo, who had experienced rickets as a child, but died of pulmonary tuberculosis and malaria.  If disability is to be understood, through more of a social model, then how helpful or meaningful is it to describe these wealthy and powerful people as disabled?  It would certainly be difficult to argue a monarch to be a member of an oppressed group, whose oppression is integral to the ideology of Capitalism which wants maximally effective, standardised (and easily replaceable) units of production - because that is good for shareholder profit.  However, Purkiss has suggested that one way of reading Charles’ illness is to see him both as rejected by others (including his older brother Henry), and subject to the normalising whims of others who wanted to cut “the string under his tongue” and “have him put in iron boots”.  She also notes stage management adjustments made for public appearances to disguise supposed shortcomings.  In art this might extend to disguising bowed legs by depicting him seated or on horseback, and elevated above others (as in the preview image where he is represented standing, while a subject sits).

Guest blogs are welcome.  Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk.  We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.

[i] Jessica L Malay (ed.) 2018, Anne Clifford’s Autobiographical Writing, 1590-1676, Manchester University Press, p178-179

[ii] Daine Purkiss, 2007, The English Civil War: A People’s History, p12-15

Blog image: King Charles I and Sir Edward Walker by unknown artist, oil on canvas, circa 1650, 59 1/2 in. x 81 in. (1511 mm x 2261 mm), National Portrait Gallery, London