SUNLIGHT AND INFANTILE PARALYSIS
An article by Science Service, quoted in Science, September 11, 1925, says:
Another of the dreaded diseases of childhood, infantile paralysis, which, like rickets, graduates large quotas of cripples, has responded to the good influence of the sun’s rays. Dr. G. Murray Levick, medical director of the Heritage Craft Schools at Chailey, Sussex (England), who originated the treatment, said that no other method has ever had as good results as this in the treatment of infantile paralysis.
Dr. Levick first deduced that neurasthenia in grown-ups and rickets in the young are due to the same cause. Both these diseases, he claims, are nutritional disturbances of the nerve centers affecting the bones in the young, and the nervous systems in the old. The action of sunlight on the skin forms a substance which is carried into the blood and feeds the nerve centers as well as the bones. His success in treating neurasthenia with sun’s rays led him to apply it to cases of infantile paralysis, a disease which is a severe shock to the nervous system and which results in muscular atrophy. Under the action of sunlight a renutrition of nerve centers takes place.
Synthetic sunlight produced by him with an electric arc light of his own invention proved as good as natural sunlight, and could be better regulated to the patient’s endurance. He used two distinct kinds of light-rays, the short ultra-violet rays for nerve nutrition, and the long red and infra-red rays for muscle treatment. Red rays, as can be seen when the hand is held up against the sunlight, penetrate the flesh to a considerable extent, and can therefore stimulate the sleeping muscle.
Dr. Levick warns that immediate success must not be expected. He has found constant improvement where short daily treatments were continued over a period of several years. While the method may not be effective in extreme cases, it is nevertheless a test which will soon show after a few treatments whether any rejuvenation of the nerve fiber is taking place.
It is now admitted that the (red) heat-waves may play some part in heliotherapy—exposure to direct sunlight for medical purposes. Dr. Lazarus-Barlow, Professor of Experimental Pathology in the University of London, concludes that even though heat-rays may also play some part in curative processes, “experience of the treatment of wounds by sunlight in France during the World War indicated that a degree of benefit arises from exposure to sunlight which cannot be attributable to warmth and ultra-violet rays. On the other hand, in the Finsen light treatment of lupus (a tubercular affection of the skin of the face, occurring in several forms) and in the treatment of tuberculosis at high altitudes, ultra-violet rays play a predominant part.”
As the ultra-violet rays penetrate but a fraction of a millimeter into the epithelium, “it is uncertain how the rays act.” The suggestion is here ventured that since the recently discovered Millikan Rays are particularly powerful under the same conditions that make application of the ultra-violet rays practicable as a therapeutic agency, it may later be found that these highly penetrating rays, of exceedingly short wave length, aid greatly in effecting some of the cures now attributed wholly to the longer (and less penetrating) ultra-violet rays or the much shorter X-rays.[7]
Professor Lazarus-Barlow calls attention to the fact that it is precisely those tubercular persons who tan easily who are said to derive the greatest benefit from a sojourn at high altitude.
Very remarkable is a recently adopted machine which “pours ultra-violet light through a funnel down the throat of a patient.” The new apparatus, first used in London, is employed for treatment of various mouth and throat diseases, “thus making it possible for patients to take internal baths of artificial sunlight” (Science, February 26, 1926).
In England, where the sky is so often overclouded, it is natural that much attention has been given to ultra-violet ray therapy. A recent press dispatch tells us:
“London recently had 23 consecutive days on which no beam of the sun could force its way through the mantle of cloud and fog which spread over that section of England. Now the Britons are making artificial suns that may be available for both indoor and outdoor illumination. Arc lights throwing powerful ultra-violet rays are being installed in beauty shops and hotels, and patrons are given opportunity to bathe their bodies in this brilliance. These rays are being billed as more potent than sun baths, and citizens who have small chance to see the orb of day get their sunshine and their medicine at one swoop.”
Two Indian scientists, S. S. Bhatnagar and R. B. Lal, of the University of the Punjab, Lahore, discovered in 1925 that germs grow faster when exposed to “polarized” light than to ordinary light. (Ordinary light—according to the undulatory theory—is due to vibrations transverse to the direction of the ray, but varying so rapidly as to show no particular direction of their own, the fronts of the light-waves crisscrossing at all angles. When, by any means, these vibrations are given a definite direction, the light is said to be polarized, the fronts of the waves being all arranged in the same direction, though the path of the rays may be plane, elliptical, circular, or rotary, according to the method of polarization employed.)
The Indian experimenters took cultures of the germs of typhoid fever and cholera, and exposed one set to ordinary light, and another to a beam of polarized light. The latter multiplied much faster than did the germs under ordinary light.
It was demonstrated in 1925 by Dr. Elizabeth S. Semmens, of Bedford College, London, that the digestion of starch takes place more readily under polarized light than in ordinary light.
Prolonged exposure to the ultra-violet rays will destroy any germs known to science. (Cathode rays—which are shorter than ultra-violet rays—will kill not only germs, but insects as well, by means of a device developed by Prof. W. D. Coolidge.)
“Bacteria,” says Dr. Coolidge, “have been rayed, and an exposure of a tenth of a second has been found sufficient to kill even highly resistant bacterial spores. Fruit flies, upon being rayed for a small fraction of a second, instantly showed almost complete collapse, and in a few hours were dead.”
This may lead to the application of cathode rays as a germicide, but their effect on higher forms of life shows that their unskilled use would be most dangerous. For example, Dr. Coolidge relates:
“The ear of a rabbit was rayed over a circular area one centimeter in diameter for one second. After several days a scab formed which fell off a few days later, taking the hair with it. Two weeks later a profuse growth of snow-white hair started which soon became much longer than the original gray hair. Another area was rayed for 50 seconds. In this case, scabs developed on both sides of the ear, which scabs later fell out, leaving a hole. The edge of this hole is now covered with snow-white hair.”
A very interesting problem to scientists relates to the question as to whether or not insects are color-blind. It may be that we now have at least a partial answer to this vexed question, and in terms of ultra-violet radiations.
Dr. Frank E. E. Germann, of Cornell University, calls attention to some recent experiments which show conclusively that at least one kind of insects (flies) have a range of vision in the ultra-violet, just as we have in the visible spectrum. It was also made “perfectly evident that flowers do have their characteristic ultra-violet radiations” (Science, March 26, 1926, page 325). It is due “to our own egotism that we call the insect color-blind.”
A given type of insect might in reality be visiting flowers of the same color as far as it was concerned, while to us it appeared to be visiting flowers of all colors. “Might not two flowers, one red and one blue, both give out the same group of wave lengths in the ultra-violet, and thus be identical in color to an insect seeing only the ultra-violet? Moreover, what is to prevent two different kinds of red flowers from giving out two entirely different sets of wave lengths in the ultra-violet, and thus appearing to have entirely different colors to an insect?”
In a very real sense, science is only at the beginning of the discoveries it will yet make in its investigations of the nature and action of ultra-violet, cathode and X-rays.