Sunlight and health / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams), 1878-1940
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sunlight and health / by C.W. Saleeby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    based upon such considerations as the notable acceleration in the decline of tuberculosis in New York, which, during visits and inquiries in that city in the two previous years, I had found to follow the sanitary regulation of 1905 forbidding the production of coal-smoke. Nowhere on earth have I seen, nor heard tell, of anything so beautiful, so significant, so hopeful, as the application of heliotherapy under the charge of Dr. Rollier. On the following day I first opened his book, “ La Cure de Soleil,” published shortly before the war, and submerged in that destructive deluge. Only a few minutes were needed to breed the determination that the book which taught what my eyes had just seen in the flesh—the whole, healed, happy flesh of hundreds—at Leysin, must appear in English, for the needs of all who speak that tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially for us in the British Isles, whose cities, thanks to our self-imposed curse of coal- smoke, and to our infamous slums, are the darkest on earth. The publication, in 1923, of Rollier’s “ Heliotherapy ” is the satisfaction—and more, for it is really a new book—of that desire. Meanwhile, it has been my privilege to see the work of other heliotherapeutists and to realise, more certainly than ever, the significance of such practice as theirs for the life of man whenever and wherever he builds and inhabits cities—as he must, for what does the very word civilisation mean ? From these lessons he “ must learn or perish.” The superb results of Sir Henry Gauvain at Alton and Hayling Island showed me that vastly much