
Aprit 28, 1923] 
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 
Alpes Vaudoises, the first clinic for the treatment of 
so-called surgical tuberculosis by sunlight; and in 
1gr1o he applied his idea to prevention by the establish- 
ment of the “school in the sun,” at Cergnat, just 
below Leysin.? In 1914, he published his book, ‘‘ La 
Cure de Soleil,” but the world catastrophe of that 
year caused it to be overlooked. In this country 
his methods have been followed recently by Sir Henry 
Gauvain, at the Treloar Hospital at Alton and Hayling 
Island, where very simple sheds and solaria serve to 
achieve results never approached by Netley, the pre- 
tentious and misplaced architecture of which exists 
in the same county to point the contrast between 
its century—the last of the ages of darkness—and 
the dawn in our own. In a very few other places, 
also, such as the Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children 
at Carshalton, under Dr. Gordon Pugh—photographs 
of which from the air show a series of three-sided 
solaria strongly resembling the health temple at Cos,— 
at Leasowe near Liverpool, at Perrysburg near Buffalo 
in the United States, and, following a recent lecture 
of mine, at the Heritage Craft Schools, Chailey, Sussex, 
the sun-cure is employed. At several others, which 
I have visited, the sun-cure is said to be employed, 
but is not, the elements of the matter being unknown 
to the persons in charge. 
The results of heliotherapy, as seen in person, or 
recorded in Rollier’s radiographic and clinical atlas 
of 1914, or shown by means of illustrations, are un- 
approached, for certainty, safety, ease, beauty, restora- 
tion of function, and happiness during and after treat- 
ment. No explanation of them, to be called intelligible 
or adequate, is offered by any of its practitioners. 
Being myself without patients or laboratories, I 
have used only the geographical method, and have 
found, at each place studied, a tendency to believe 
that the various factors there present are essential 
for the results obtained. In the mountains, altitude 
is insisted upon ; at the sea, the argument for “ helio- 
_ Alpine” is replaced by an argument for “ helio- 
Marine.” In high latitudes, the Mediterranean is 
_ described as impossible for sun-cure ; on visiting the 
Mediterranean, I found the sun-cure gloriously success- 
ful on the French and Italian Riviera, and there are 
similar reports from Spain. The fundamental bases 
were lacking for a superlatively successful empirical 
practice, conducted by various clinicians under widely 
varying conditions and in ignorance, for the most 
part, of each other’s methods. No rational statement 
of the scope of heliotherapy could be obtained, some 
strongly denying, while Rollier strongly averred, that 
tuberculosis is amenable to the treatment when it 
happens to be situated in the lungs, as it is amenable 
when situated elsewhere. In his volume of rorq, 
Rollier mentioned certain other conditions besides 
tuberculosis, such as rickets, a non-hacterial discase, 
but the only explanation of the sun-cure that he offered 
was based on the antiseptic action of sunlight, while 
? The “ school in the sun,” in summer and winter, was demonstrated after 
the discourse by means of a film. 
NO. 2791, VOL. III] 
NATURE 
See ee 
Me ee SS eee ee 
af 
Gauvain explicitly regarded the sunlight as only an 
adjuvant in his method. 
Clearly the need was for a properly co-ordinated 
scientific inquiry into the action of sunlight upon the 
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 incom- 
parable medicament. My demands (e.g. in NATURE, 
December 8, 1921, p. 466; January 5, 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 ‘Soleil, ” 4 on which I resolved immedi- 
ately after my first v isit to Leysin. 
Already 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 that 
the dissociation of carbon dioxide by the green leaf 
is due to the sun’s light and not to its heat. Vet, 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 mid-day 
sun, perhaps for an hour or two, with natural results 
in fever and hemoptysis. Already, also, the idea 
that the light is less valuable in killing the infective 
agent than in raising the bodily resistance to it—an 
idea to which I invited attention nearly twenty years 
ago, at the death of Finsen—has come into the ‘clinical 
mind. Since last August in the Light Department 
of the London Hospital—which has done such splendid 
though limited work on the older hypothesis, since 
1900—the general light bath has been used as well 
as the local treatment, and cases which resisted the 
latter have been completely cured by general exposure 
of the nude skin to the electric arc lamp, without 
local irradiation. We must use a combination of light 
and cold, which I have been commending for some time 
on the evidence of visits to Canada, where a magnificent 
childhood, free from rickets, thrives in extreme cold, 
thanks, as I believe, to a brilliant sun. 
In various American laboratories the subject is now 
being advanced: notably in Columbia University, 
New York, under Dr. Alfred F. Hess and his fellow- 
workers. They attribute the major part of the action 
of the sun to the ultra-violet rays, by which, in experi- 
mental animals and also in infants, they are able to 
cure rickets with great speed, ease, and certainty, and 
to increase very markedly the phosphorus in the 
blood of infants on a constant diet. When I saw this 
experimental and clinical work in New York last 
December, the result had already been reached of 
demonstrating an annual curve, from month to month, 
of phosphorus in the blood of infants, with a maximum 
in June-July, and a minumum in March, corresponding 
with the monthly height of the sun in New York. 
By radiographic study of the bones of infants, it had 
also been shown that no new cases of rickets occur 
* “ Heliotherapy,” by Dr, A. Rollier, with forewords by Sir H. J. Gauvain 
and Dr. C. W. Saleeby. Oxford Medical Publications, 1923. 
