I can bore people about the colorful history of celiac disease forever! but the BEST takeaway Fact is this:
In the 1940s, the connection between celiac disease and gluten was discovered by the Dutch physician Willem Dicke, who oversaw a hospital ward of children with celiac disease. The mortality rate of these children was over 35%, until -
Oh! Sorry! Was that shocking or something? Yes. Over thirty five percent of children would die. The children were taken from their parents and put in the hospital because they could not grow. They were malnourished, their brains couldn’t develop, they were weak and disabled and cognitively impaired - and over a third of them were expected to die. Heartbreakingly and in pain. That’s celiac disease, you know, that’s just what it does…
Is that surprising? You know what’s funny - in the Victorian era bananas were marketed as the first superfood, because babies fed on banana seemed to be protected from death by celiac disease. Desperate Victorian parents in Europe would scour the cities for the priceless and rare banana, in the hopes of protecting - or saving - their children from this ghostly and horrific disease. This scourge, this wasting illness that took your bright-eyed chubby cheerful nursling and turned them dull-eyed and listless, screaming when touched, their hair falling out, failing to thrive and all your dreams failing with them. So that’s partly why bananas had such a marketing boom! To this day, people are obsessed with giving bananas and banana-flavoured things to babies, a hangover from a time when people thought they could prevent a deadly and incurable disease! Fun fact. Fun fact.
Anyway, more than a third of little kids with celiac disease were expected to die and the disease was incurable - a life sentence. Back to Dr Dicke, a Dutchman in the 1940s in the Netherlands; you can see where this is going.
Dr Dicke stayed with his ward when the Nazis invaded and began the Hongerwinter, the Hunger Winter, the Dutch famine of 1944. This was very hard for the medical staff, who fed the sick children on the water that they had boiled tulip bulbs in, and so on. But Dr Dicke noticed that his celiac ward, while starving to death and being lightly poisoned by tulips, were also cheering up a bit. The other kids were dying as normal, but the celiac mortality rate went from 35% to zero. “Weird,” said Dr Dicke, who was an admirable scientist despite the stress of looking after dying babies in a starving Nazi-occupied city.
Then the Nazis agreed to let the Canadians air-drop in some food. Naturally, bread was an obvious choice. The Canadians dropped bread on Amsterdam. People grabbed the bread, and some of it made its way to the Hospital for Sick Children, because people are kind. And Dr Dicke took some of the precious life-saving morsels and went straight to his sickest kids, his celiac kids. He was being kind.
aaaaaand they went right back to dying.
“Fuck me!” Said Dr Dicke, “I have solved the medical mystery of a disease that has plagued Western civilisation since the ancient Greeks.”
And just like that, it really was just like that, celiac disease stopped being a death sentence for little weanling babies.
I mean, I know it’s obvious that modern culture has mindlessly forgotten the events of WW2, but fun fact: we don’t shove bread-and-milk down the necks of three month old babies anymore AND WE KNOW BETTER NOW, and all those babies who would have died from it got to grow up, and got to pass that critical stage of growth where you die from malnourishment.
they got to grow up into a generation that laughs at the accessibility and availability of gluten free food.
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