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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    pasture in the sunlight maintains the growth and health of young animals, whereas the milk of cows fed in shadow and on vitamin-free fodder will not maintain life. Our children are thus disadvantaged in winter by light-starvation, and by the defect of the milk of light-starved cows.* Photographic study of houses and housing on both sides of the Atlantic illustrates the problem of urban light-starvation. Finding New York smokeless in 1919, I later made investigations with the aid of Dr. Royal S. Copeland, the Health Commissioner of that city, and found that the death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis had been reduced by one- half in the period, 1905-1919, of the operation of the sanitary regulation against smoke.f The restora¬ tion of sunlight to our urban lives is the next great task of public health in Great Britain. “ There is no darkness but ignorance,55 as Shake¬ speare said. In every sense we need “ more light.55 Then we must apply our knowledge, less for helio¬ therapy than heliohygiene, until we have banished what I call the diseases of darkness, and it may be said of us that “ The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light, and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.55 * To some extent, Antipodean sunlight, in the form of dried milk from New Zealand, comes to the rescue (see Chapter XIII.). | The smoke prohibited in New York or in Winnipeg, where I found similar regulations, need not, as in our futile Public Health Act, be “ black.” See “ The Eugenic Prospect ” (Part II., “ Let There be Light ”) (loc. cit.).
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