66 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



disease of the bones, especially in young animals, in which 

 for some reason or other the lime and phosphorus salts are 

 not deposited properly in the growing bones. They say 

 eighty per cent of the babies and young children in New 

 York City have some tendency or symptoms of ricketts, 

 showing the great prevalence of ricketts in our large cities. 



Ricketts is a disease of civilization. Savages may 

 starve but they never have ricketts. It is an interesting 

 fact that dogs sometimes have ricketts and cats do not. A 

 dog is our dog. He is an entirely domesticated animal. 

 Our cats condescend to live with us and go out in the way 

 of the world, prowling at night, and perhaps because of 

 that retention of freedom they do not have ricketts. If 

 you take the feline tribe and confine them in a zoo, for 

 instance lions and tigers, they quite often have ricketts 

 under those enforced domestic conditions. 



From the standpoint of human nutrition ricketts is of 

 very great importance in the raising of young children. 

 It has been found ricketts can be cured and prevented by 

 the use of cod liver oil. It furnishes not only vitamine A, 

 which is concerned with growth and also is necessary for 

 adults, but also contains exceedingly large amounts of vita- 

 mine D. 



The fact that cod liver oil cured ricketts was long 

 known along the seacoast of European countries, as France, 

 Norway and Sweden, but it was not known why it did it. 

 In 1922 it was discovered that cod liver oil contains these 

 two different vitamines, which have the two different func- 

 tions, containing vitamine A that prevents and cures rick- 

 etts; so now if there is any danger of a child having ricketts, 

 cod liver oil is an excellent thing to give him. At the pres- 

 ent time I am giving cod liver oil to my youngest boy six 

 years old, not that he has ricketts but to assist in the tre- 

 mendous task the body has in building the skeleton. He is 

 a boy growing up just like I did. I was my present height 

 when I was thirteen or fourteen, over six feet tall and as 

 thin as a rail, and he is growing just the same way father 

 did. Although he is using liberal amounts of dairy prod- 

 ucts, as a precaution I am making him take cod liver oil. 



