"The English Disease" or "Asian Rickets"? Medical Responses to Postcolonial Immigration

Roberta E Bivins

doi:10.1353/bhm.2007.0062

Abstract

Do the former colonizing powers, like their former colonies, have "postcolonial medicine," and if so, where does it take place, who practices it, and upon whom? How has British medicine in particular responded to the huge cultural shifts represented by the rise of the New Commonwealth and associated postcolonial immigration? I address these questions through a case study of the medical and political responses to vitamin D deficiency among Britain's South Asian communities since the 1960s. My research suggests that in these contexts, diet frequently became a proxy or shorthand for culture (and religion, and race), while disease justified pressure to assimilate.

Highlights

As historians have demonstrated over the last two decades, the practice of medicine and medical research across a diversity of colonial and imperial contexts shared a particular relationship with power, whether that power be examined at the institutional, the political, or the social level.[1]
More-sensitive responses to increasingly sophisticated understandings of ethnicity came later, and initially from local, rather than national, initiatives.)[57] But for the Metabolic Unit and other similar research groups, including the University College Hospital (UCH) Metabolic Ward and the Middlesex Hospital researchers discussed below, the solution to the puzzle of rickets in the population they generally called “immigrants” or “the Asian community” was of interest principally because it would contribute to unraveling the complex vitamin D cycle
In October 1972, COMA’s Panel on Child Nutrition, in response to heavy reporting in the biomedical press of vitamin D deficiency among British Asians and fears of its emergence in parts of the indigenous community, “concluded that expert working groups should be formed to deal with various aspects of the problem of rickets and osteomalacia in the immigrant population.”[58]. The remit of the working groups was to develop standardized methodologies for determining the incidence and severity of disease, and, if possible, its causes

Summary

Introduction

As historians have demonstrated over the last two decades, the practice of medicine and medical research across a diversity of colonial and imperial contexts shared a particular relationship with power, whether that power be examined at the institutional, the political, or the social level.[1].

Results

Conclusion