For nearly half a century rachitis, or “rickets,” has been known as the disease of the children of the poor. It has been so called ever since Sir William Jenner noticed that after the first two births, the children of the poor began to get rickety, and careful investigation showed that the cause was poverty, the mothers being generally too poor to get proper nourishment while nursing them.[14] It is perhaps the commonest disease from which children of the working-classes suffer. A large proportion of the children in the public schools and on the streets of the poorest quarters of our cities, and a majority of those treated at the dispensaries or admitted into the children’s hospitals, are unmistakably victims of this disease. One sees them everywhere in the poor neighborhoods. The misshapen heads and the legs bent and twisted awry are unmistakable signs, and the scanty clothing covers pitiful little “pigeon-breasts.” The small chests are narrowed and flattened from side to side, and the breast-bones are forced unnaturally forward and outward. Tens of thousands of children suffer from this disease, which is due almost wholly to poor and inadequate food. Here again statistical records hide and imprison the soul of truth, failing to yield the faintest idea of the ravages of this disease. The number of deaths credited to it in 1900 was only 351 for the whole of the United States, whereas 10,000 would not have been too high a figure. [Illustration: BABIES WHOSE MOTHERS WORK—THEY ARE CARED FOR IN A DAY NURSERY ] Seldom, if ever, fatal by itself, rickets is indirectly responsible for a tremendous quota of the infantile death-rate.[15] In epidemics of such infectious diseases as measles, whooping-cough, and others, the rickety child falls an easy victim. In these diseases, as well as in bronchitis, pneumonia, convulsions, diarrhœa, and many other disorders, the mortality is far higher among rickety children than among others. Nor do the evils of rachitis cease with childhood, but in later life they are unquestionably important and severe. There is no escape for the victim even though the storms of childhood be successfully weathered, but like some cruel, relentless Nemesis the consequences pursue the adult. The weakening of the constitution in infancy through poverty and underfeeding cannot be remedied, and epilepsy and tuberculosis find easy prey among those whose childhood had laid upon it the curse of poverty in the form of rickets.