Sunlight and health / by C.W. Saleeby.

  • Caleb Saleeby
Date:
[1923]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

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    to the reproductive system. Also we must recognise the significance of rickets in relation to parenthood. When I was resident physician in the Royal Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh, in 1901, there was inaugurated the first bed, in any hospital in the world, devoted to the expectant mother. That ante-natal bed has now grown into a ward, and is copied all the world over. The pioneer to whom it was solely due was Dr. John William Ballantyne, first of modern men to recognise the truth, well known to Moses, that life begins in the womb, and our care of it must begin there too. As a matter of history, let me here record that the first patient to occupy that first ante-natal bed in the world was a little rickety woman from smoky Leeds. Failing any other possibility of deliverance, Caesarean section was performed. She died, and soon afterwards her hapless infant died in my arms. Such was the inauspicious beginning of a great epoch in the care of motherhood. But rickets is a disease of darkness. An Edinburgh graduate had taught the truth about it in 1890, and been ignored in Edinburgh and every¬ where else. The restoration of sunlight to its primary place in hygiene and medicine must mean the end of rickets, and thus the end of all those cases where rickety contraction and distortion of the female pelvis involves the gravest risks to motherhood and the maintenance of the race. In 1921 I first saw Ley sin, directed thereto by Dr. Ceresole, of Lausanne, with whom I had dis¬ cussed my campaign for what I call helio-hygiene,
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