CRAVING FOR SUNLIGHT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 105, 24 June 1911, Page 7

CRAVING FOR SUNLIGHT.

Writing on “Light as a Preservative of Hcaltii,” in me “Windsor Magazine,” .Sir James Crichton-Browne says:—“ln certain states of exhaustion and reduced nutrition, there arises a craving for sunlight, and in the grounds of any asylum in summer lime, you may see chronic lunatics complacently basking in what would bo a distressing and broiling glare to ordinarily constituted persons. That it is not altogether the float rays that attract them is indicated by the fact that those same lunatics do not hang round the lireplaces within the building. But the surviving direct influence of light on the skin generally in. man is comparatively unimportant, i believe, in comparison with its reflex influence through the eye; and that reflex influence lias not yot, it seems ■to mo, received the attention it deserves. We are apt to think that'the eye is for seeing only, and to ignore its subordinate functions, hut one of those subordinate functions is, I suggest, its transmuting light into a trophic stimulus to the system generally. Light, operating through the eye, brain, and spinal cord, is, I maintain, a universal tonic, promoting health and nutrition, and so increasing resistance to disease. The blind are almost invaluably feeble, anaemic, and prone to illness. No doubt other concomitants of their affliction are partly responsible for their debility, but the deprivation of trophic influence, which their sightlessness involves is, I believe, its chief cause.”