Rickets is mostly seen as a 19th-century disease, but research has revealed that the Romans also had a big problem with getting enough vitamin D.

Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.

Rickets is caused by vitamin D deficiency, often because of a lack of exposure to sunshine. It was a particular problem in the crowded, polluted towns and cities of 19th-century Britain and is often assumed to be a Victorian disease.

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“This is something that prompted us to look at the Roman period,” said Simon Mays, a human skeletal biologist at Historic England. “In Victorian times we normally associate it with the rise of urban living, and of course the Roman empire saw the first widespread urbanisation in Europe. Might we find it there as well?”

During the three-year project, researchers examined skeletons from northern England to southern Spain, looking for the deformities generally seen in rickets. Evidence for rickets was found in more than one in 20 children, with most cases in infants.

“The big surprise to me was how young most of the sufferers were,” said Mays. “Some were suffering even in the first few months of life. The inescapable conclusion was that people were keeping their infants indoors too much.”

Quite why mothers might have been staying inside with their children is open for debate. “One tends to assume most women would have gone out and worked in agriculture: this throws open the possibility that that did not happen.”

The research reveals that Britain had the most rickets, presumably because of the cloudy skies and rainy climate.

Unlike in Victorian times, Roman-period rickets was less common in towns than in cities, apart from one place: Ostia in Italy, a port on the Tiber, which was densely populated with many people living in the equivalent of multi-storey apartment buildings.

Megan Brickley, of McMaster University, the principal investigator on the project, said: “Living in apartments with small windows, in blocks that were closely spaced around courtyards and narrow streets, may have meant that many children weren’t exposed to enough sunlight to prevent vitamin D deficiency.”

The research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, shows that vitamin D deficiency is far from being a new problem. But it also has pointers for how we should live today.

Mays said: “It shows how important getting out in to the sunshine is. We tend to be a little nervous of getting kids exposed because of the risk of skin cancer and quite rightly so … but this shows you can take sunlight avoidance too far and I think that was happening in Roman times and they were paying the penalty in cases of rickets.”