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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    In the second half of the nineteenth century, we find certain heralds of the dawn. In 1856, Florence Nightingale vigorously but vainly protested against the orientation of Netley Hospital, observing that no sunlight could ever enter its wards. In 1876, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson praised sunlight in his “ Hygeia, the City of Health.” In 1877, Downes and Blunt showed that sunlight will kill anthrax bacilli. In many writings at this period, John Ruskin upheld sunlight and declaimed against the “ plague-cloud ” of smoke above our cities. In 1890, Dr. Theobald Adrian Palm (nut. 1848), who still practises medicine at Aylesford, in the Garden of England, showed by the geographical method that lack of sunlight is the chief factor in the causa¬ tion of rickets, and added an admirable series of recommendations accordingly.* His paper was entirely ignored, and I found it in America, thanks to an American bibliographer. Robert Koch and others showed that sunlight kills tubercle bacilli. In 1893, Niels Finsen began to cure lupus, a form of cutaneous tuberculosis, by the local use of sunlight, and Sir James Crichton-Browne made observations to the same effect in this country. In 1900, on May 1st, the London Hospital began the cure of lupus by the local use of sunlight, thanks to the really effective sovereign touch of Queen Alexandra, who was instrumental in bringing her young fellow- countryman’s idea from Copenhagen. In 1903, Dr. A. Rollier opened at Leysin, in the * “ The Geographical Distribution and ^Etiology of Rickets,” The Practitioner, October and November, 1890
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