De rachitide, sive, morbo puerili, qui vulgò the rickets dicitur, tractatus (A treatise on rickets, or the disease of children, commonly called rickets), by Francis Glisson. Printed in London by William Dugard, Laurence Sadler, and Robert Beaumont, 1650. Lower Library, L.2.36

Francis Glisson (1599?–1677), notable physician and philosopher, studied at Caius as an undergraduate and remained at the college for almost two decades. He matriculated in 1617, and by 1624 he was a fellow. He was dean of the college in 1629 and obtained his MD (Doctor of Medicine) degree in 1634. He held the position of Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge until his death in 1677.

The work we have on display here is Glisson’s treatise on rickets. Rickets is a condition affecting bone development in children, which can cause bone deformities. We now know that this is usually caused by extreme vitamin D deficiency, but in the seventeenth century there was a great deal of panic about this ‘new’ disease and its causes. Glisson was not quite the first to have written on the subject, Daniel Whistler had written a dissertation on the subject in 1645, but it was Glisson’s work which became the more well known, translated from Latin into English a year later and reprinted multiple times in both languages. There has been much speculation as to whether the two works can have truly been composed independently, or whether there was some measure of collaboration or plagiarism involved.¹

Glisson’s treatise, with its emphasis on morbid anatomy (the study of diseased organs), was ground-breaking, both for this approach and for being the first detailed monograph focusing on a single disease to be published in Britain.²

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1. Edwin Clarke, ‘Whistler and Glisson on Rickets’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36, no. 1 (1962): 45–61.
2. Christopher Brooke, A History of Gonville and Caius College (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996), 115.