While acting as a resident Medical Officer in
the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, the
writer was very much impressed by the general improvement he saw in certain cases attending the Artificial
Heliotherapy Department of the hospital.
These cases were Bent to the department, not
suffering from any definite disease, but labelled
"General Debility ", "Anaemia ", "Post-operative
debility ", "Debility from chronic sepsis ", etc.
The beneficial effects of Heliotherapy in Rickets,
Surgical Tuberculosis and other definite diseases are
well known and have been most thoroughly investigated
by hosts of observers. However it occurred to the
writer to investigate a series of such children and
find out whether the beneficial effects of the Heliotherapy could be accounted for, by any changes in
certain components of their blood.
The selected children were all of a type so very
common in any large medical out -patient department of
a city hospital. The type of child represented is
well known to all pediatricians. It is the child of
the poorer hospital class, probably living in one of
the worst quarters of the city, inefficiently clothed,
under nourished but yet not showing any of the clinical
manifestations of rickets. There is usually a long
history of chronic ill -health. The child is said to
sleep badly, eat little, is easily tired, looks pale
and is under average weight and height. When examined
no definite disease is found but what usually strikes
one is the very bad posture of these children probably
from an undernourished muscular system. The child is
usually labelled general debility or some such term
and given a tonic. Previous to artificial heliotherapy, there usually was little improvement with
this treatment unless the children were sent to the
country or seaside (natural heliotherapy).
Now, however, these children make up a large
percentage of the children attending the Heliotherapy
Dept, as outpatients and their improvement is most
encouraging to all those interested in the use of
artificial heliotherapy. The investigation aimed
at finding out if any changes in certain components
of the blood in these children could account for
their improvement.
The components investigated were the Red Blood
Corpuscles, the White Blood Corpuscles, the Haemoglobin content and the Platelets. The Calcium and
phosphorus concentrations in the blood were also
estimated at intervals in case any change in these
important inorganic constituents of the blood could
cause the effect noted.
All of these children showed such a marked
improvement in colour along with the other manifestations, that the writer was hopeful some important
changes could be demonstrated in the blood components
investigated, to account for the great change in
the/
5.
the child's health. It was with this idea that the
investigation was carried out, and though the results
obtained are not as convincing as was hoped, yet they
are so uniform that in the writer's mind, it is certain
that Actinotherapy has a very definite therapeutic
action on a blood of poor qualities, the latter being
due more to the nourishment of the individual than to
any definite organic disease.
May not most of these children be suffering from
an insufficiency of some vitamin, either A, D or some
other not yet isolated, and that sunlight has the
same effect here as in Vitamin D insufficiency?
