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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    nineteenth century industrialism and waste at their worst: No one who has the true interests of our tuberculous population at heart can fail to regret Dr. Saleeby’s suggestion that sunshine can cure tuberculosis. (Manchester Guardian, April 24th, 1922.) What can be said of the fact that a high authority could write such words nineteen years after Dr. Rollier began curing tuberculosis by sunlight, not more than twenty-four hours away from our shores ? Or what can be said of those who persist in con¬ founding light and heat (as if Shakespeare had written “ Fear no more the light of the sun ”), unable to learn from, for instance, the natural practice of the animals in our Zoological Gardens, who seek the early morning light of the sun but avoid its midday heat ? Or of those who persist in confounding light and air, like the critic of my lecture on sunlight at the Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute in 1922, who declined to perceive anything new to learn, for she had herself “ been preaching fresh air for thirty-live years ” ? Or of those who, never having seen heliotherapy in practice, nor having read a line by any of its students, begin by exposing the chests of phthisical patients to the midday sun for an hour or so, and then infer from the subsequent pyrexia, haemoptysis and autopsy that sunlight is useless in pulmonary tuberculosis ? Or of those who proclaim satisfaction with the ghastly records of our sanatorium system in this country, unaware that every sanatorium which is not in essence a solarium must to-day be called a tragic farce ? Or of the
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