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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    and to cure them by its incomparable means. And as recently as December, 1922, I had the advantage of seeing the work of Dr. Alfred F. Hess, of New York, and of his colleagues, in Columbia University, and at the Home for Hebrew Infants, where he has shown that the quantity of phosphorus in the blood of babies rises from winter to summer and falls from summer to winter, whilst the incidence of rickets (“ la maladie cle Vombre par excellence ” as Dr. Rollier has described it to me) consentaneously falls and rises. (It was an Englishman, Dr. Theobald Adrian Palm, who, in 1890, in the Practitioner, a generation ago, first taught the relation of rickets to darkness and to sunlight ; but no one heeded him.) The very few who have protested in England that we were sinning against the light, are now seen to be right : John Evelyn, who wrote his “ Fumi- fugium ” in 1661, and condemned the “ hellish cloud of sea-coal that maketh the City of London resemble the suburbs of hell5 5 ; and John Ruskin, who inveighed against the “ plague clouds ” that ascended from our industrial cities, and was thought to be a fool for his pains ; and Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, one of the few doctors who have had Latin enough to know that doctor means teacher ; and Sir William Blake Richmond, the painter who knew that, as St. Augustine said, “ Light is the queen of colours.” Dr. Rollier and his followers have vindicated them all; and in praise of the sunlight the half has not yet been said. Who could have guessed, a year or two ago, that a few minutes’ exposure to it daily will double the quantity of