Rickets & Windows

Posted by jns on May 2, 2005

File under “unintended consequences”:

In 1696 a window tax was introduced in Britain when the financially hard-pressed govenment started taxing properties based on the number of windows. The citizenry responded by bricking up windows and the darker houses are thought to have contributed to an increased incidence of rickets and tuberculosis.

[David Whitehouse, The Sun: A Biography (Wiley, Chichester, 2005), p. 93.]