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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    body in health and disease. We were using it as we used digitalis for the heart before pharmacology (to compare a great thing with one relatively trivial) ; we needed a true physio-pharmacology of this incomparable medicament. My demands {e.g., in Nature, December 8th, 1921, p. 466 ; January 5th, 1922, p. 11) for such an inquiry were met, after six months, by the Medical Research Council, early in 1922, and from the date of the appointment of the Special Committee, under the chairmanship of Sir William Bayliss, a new chapter in clinical and preventive medicine, I believe, will be seen to begin, its provisional opening being the new and largely rewritten translation into English of “ La Cure de Soled,”* on which I resolved immediately after my first visit to Leysin. Alreadv we have at least made it clear to all critics that the action is due to the sun’s light and not to its heat. So long ago as 1779, Ingenhouss showed, as I am reminded by Sir James Dewar, that the dissociation of carbon dioxide by the green leaf is due to the sun’s light and not to its heat. Yet, in several instances, the sun-cure has been tried, with calamitous results, by clinicians who, making no inquiry into the matter, have exposed the unaccus¬ tomed chests of phthisical patients to the midday sun, perhaps for an hour or two, with natural results in fever and haemoptysis. Already, also, the idea that the light is less valuable in killing the infective agent than in raising the bodily resistance to it—an * “ Heliotherapy,” by Dr. A. Rollier, with forewords by Sir H. J. Gauyain and Dr. C. W. Saleeby. Oxford Medical Publications, 1923 S.H. o
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