Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency—A Conversation With Author Christian Warren and Professor Kathleen Axen

Tracing the efforts to understand, prevent, and treat rickets, Professor Christian Warren‘s second book, Starved for Light: The Long Shadow of Rickets and Vitamin D Deficiency (University of Chicago Press, 2024), places the disease at the center of a riveting medical history, one alert to the ways society shapes our views on illness. Warren shows how physicians and public health advocates in the United States turned their attention to rickets among urban immigrants, both African Americans and southern Europeans. Some concluded that the disease was linked to race, while others blamed poverty, sunless buildings and cities, or cultural preferences in diet and clothing. Sweeping and engaging, the book illuminates the social conditions underpinning our cures and our choices, helping us to see history’s echoes in contemporary prescriptions.

Warren specializes in the history of medicine and public health in the United States.  He is now working on a book tracing the history of American’s “migration” into the indoors. His first book, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), won the APHA’a Arthur Viseltear Award. His doctoral dissertation, “The Silenced Epidemic: A Social History of Lead Poisoning in the United States Since 1900,” won the American Society for Environmental History’s Rachel Carson Prize. He has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, Business History Review, and Public Health Reports, and guest editorials in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Professor of Health and Nutrition Sciences Kathleen Axen is a research scientist in nutrition. She has been a full-time faculty member at Brooklyn College since 1983 and has taught a dozen different undergraduate and graduate courses in nutrition and mentored many students in laboratory research, some of whom have completed their master’s thesis with her. She has been the graduate deputy chair of the M.S. in nutrition program since its beginning in 1985. Her work at Columbia University focused on type 1 diabetes, in which auto-immune destruction of the pancreatic insulin-producing cells accounts for massive metabolic impairments. Her 2.5-year postdoctoral research fellowship in endocrinology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine elucidated aspects of the signaling mechanism for insulin release.

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