OUR BABIES.

Franklin Times, Volume XIX, Issue 93, 12 August 1929, Page 7

OUR BABIES.

(By Hygeia.)

Published under tne auspices o 1 the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children (Plunket Society). “It is wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom.”

SUNLIGHT AND HEALTH. We make some extracts this week from an article written by Dr. C. W. Saleeby in a new publication called, “Golden Health.” This is being issued serially in fortnightly magazine parts under the auspices of the New Health Society arid the editorship of Sir Arbuthnot Lane. There is a goodly list of contributors— specialists and enthusiasts in their various subjects. The three parts already published have contained many articles of great interest and value, and we would recommend them to our readers. Dr. Saleeby is an authority and certainly an enthusiast on his chosen subject—“ Sunlight and Health.” He is a writer of books; and leader of energetic and sustained propaganda against the evils of smoke and the “ diseases of darkness,” as he has called consumption and rickets, and an equally enthusiastic advocate of the value and potency of natural sunlight and pure air.

These are some of the striking things Dr. Saleeby says: - “ ‘ln the beginning God said, Let there be light, and there was light.’ In the beginning of medical science Hippocrates and Cos, the Father of Medicine, used the Mediterranean sunlight (in which our own civilisation was born and nurtured) to cure his Athenian patients. The Temple of Aesculapius, in which Hippocrates was a priest, gave him and his patients access to abundance of unpolluted sunlight, fresh air, pure water, and pure fresh food from the hills and valleys beyond it. These are the life-saving agents, the things we live by, to which our contemporary medicine and hygiene, our urban hospitals, our children’s schools in the sun, are at longlast seeking to return. As long as man remains a child and creature of heaven and earth these celestial and

terrestrial agents will be his means of life and healing. “The pagan world fell, and with i>' much evil, but also such true beginnings of philosophy and science as those of which we now remind ourselves. For long, dark ages they were lost. . . . Hippocrates notwithstanding, Occidental medicine was really derived from notions of magic and superstition which the wise Greek would have scorned. No few traces of then unscientific—nay, anti-scien-tific—ideas and practices are to be found even to-day in the methods and the materia medica 'of the modern world.

The Sculptor Sun. “In the nineteenth century we find a few names of those who may be called the heralds of the dawn. Of these the greatest was Florence Nightingale, who vainly protested in 1856 against the building of Netley Hospital, which offered a pretentious facade to Southampton Water by excluding all sunlight from the wards. She failed, for once, and the hospital remains, it may be called the last monument of the dark ages, but wrongly,'for not a few hospitals and schools have since been built in similar fashion, sinning against the Light of Life. Everyone to-day knows, however, that hospital authorities of all kinds everywhere are rebuilding, extending, erecting colonies and convalescent homes with the admission of and access to unpolluted sunlight as their first consideration. Florence Nightingale was the pioneer of this policy in the modern world. Writing on ‘Nursing’ in Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine, she declared that ‘the sun is not only a painter, he is also a sculptor.’ Such is genius, which clearly sees with insight what common sight with infinite peering dimly discerns long years after. The sun is not only a painter, making all our colours in the sky, in the meadows, and in our cheeks and lips—all worth looking at —but he is also a sculptor, creating, as we now know, in the living skin receiving his rays that ‘anti-rachitic’ (rickets-curing) vitamin D, which builds and moulds the bones, including the jaws and teeth aright. Under the influence of the sculptor sun, using vitamin D as his magic chisel, which works from within, young bodies are now being built up, notably in Germany, which may fairly be compared strength and beauty to the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Gallery and to the' noblest and loveliest Venus of Pericles or Praxiteles. Those old human sculptors did not create; they did but record the masterpieces of which the sculptor sun, if we will but let him, is as easily lavish to-day as he was in the age of Pericles.

“The Disease of Darkness.”

“Without the sculptor sun children suffer from rickets, ‘la maladie de l’amble par excellence,’ as Dr Rollier, of Leysin calls it. . . . Tuberculosis is the prince of the powers of darkness. Confident assertions during the past seven years as to its cure and prevention by sunlight based on the evidence of Dr. Rollicr’s clinics and school in the sun at Leysin 'in Switzerland, have repeatedly been met with suggestions of exaggeration. Time is proving otherwise. But tuberculosis is far from being the only disease of darkness. In this country (England) our characteristic plagues today are air-borne, and attack the airsystem, just as the water and food-

borne diseases used to attack the food system. . . . ”

Dr. Saleeby goes on to speak of the respiratory diseases, pneumonia, bronchitis, certain forms of influenza, and the 'Common cold, and to point out most strikingly their high incidence and deadly effects. His remarks apply more especially to the Old Country, with its huge, smoke-laden cities, but the same general principles apply even

in our own country. We congregate in towns which are growing into cities, our factories and works are allowed to pollute the atmosphere with filthy black smoke, our children are crowded into city schools, and the winter takes its toll of lives and fitness and efficiency. We have almost wiped out diarrhoea as a cause of death in early childhood by means of widespread restoration of breast-feeding, correct artificial feeding and mothercraft' knowledge generally. The respiratory diseases now take a far more prominent place in Causing death or dsablement. And experience everywhere proves the same great truths. Bring children up from the beginning in the open air and sunlight with light and suitable clothing, accustom them thus and by the judicious use of cold water to withstand changes of temperature, give them the “sunshine foods,” and they will be pretty well germproof—epidemics pass them by. Dr Saleeby ends his article with these noble words: “As we have conquered the water-borne diseases by restoring a pure river of the water of life to our cities, so we shall abolish the diseases of darkness by restoring to them the light of life. And then it will be said, as of old, ‘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.’ ”