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.

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    the ‘ red water/ and taking a full and rich diet.” But I must leave Dr. Caton and proceed, though not without quoting his final sentences : The influence of Hippocrates tended alike to the acqui¬ sition of what was new and valuable, and to the denial and the casting off of all that was useless and superstitious. While he reverenced the supreme gods, he had more confi¬ dence in rest, pure air, exercise, diet, remedies, and in the restorative powers of Nature than in the interposition of Asklepios or the influence of the sacred serpents. In fact, in this building, under the guidance of Hippocrates, medicine probably arose as a helpful instrumentality, based on foundations scientific and practical, and in a nobler form than the world had ever seen, for the relief of the sufferings of mankind. We need only add that the Greeks of that age have never been equalled in body or in mind by any subsequent peoples in nearly twenty-five centuries. It was not Harley Street, but its parallel neigh¬ bour, Wimpole Street, which Tennyson, in “ In Memoriam,” described as the “ long, unlovely street.” Both were then, some eighty years ago, and are still, long and unlovely. They are devoted to the efforts of the most illustrious students and servants of life. Not so much as a single blade of grass is to be found within them ; to that extent, at least, they illustrate a great aim of modern surgery, and are sterilised. Except for a good supply of clean water in the houses, there is no natural agent of life or health that the medical area of this mighty metropolis now exhibits. A census of open windows showed Harley Street houses to be, for the most part, as nearly hermetically sealed as those of any other area; and, since the “ air ”
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