Sunlight and health / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Caleb Saleeby
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

    41/218 page 5
    Eugenics was my first love, for whom I forsook the practice of medicine, having yet scarcely begun it. The late Sir Francis Galton’s lecture to the Sociological Society, in 1904, inaugurating modern eugenics, settled that question for me. Twenty years after, we are no nearer the original Galtonian eugenics—positive eugenics, as I called it with his consent.1 He was right when, in another com¬ munication, soon after the first, he told us that, for success, the eugenic idea must affect us with the force of a religion. Without some such effective emotional stimulus we may discuss and study eugenics, but we do not practise it. I see not the remotest prospect, in any land, of any such effective sentiment as Galton saw the need for, if eugenics was to deserve the name of action. But, failing positive eugenics, the encouragement of worthy parenthood, as I have defined it, there remain certain possibilities which, for what they are worth, we must pursue. There is negative eugenics, the discouragement of unworthy parenthood, as by the permanent segregation of the feeble-minded. There is the study of the development of childhood and youth, so that at least parenthood may later be possible without preventable risk or defect. Here we touch upon the relations of sunlight to the normal processes of development. We must, for instance, study the effect of sunlight upon the ductless glands, which have potent controlling and directive relations 1 See “ Parenthood and Race Culture : An Outline of Eugenics,” 1909 (Cassell, London ; MoSatt, Yard, New York), the first book on eugenics, dedicated to Galton, who read it before publication. (Out of print.)
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