Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health

Rise and Shine

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Rise and Shine Sunlight, Technology and Health

SIMON CARTER

Oxford • New York

English edition First published in 2007 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Simon Carter 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carter, Simon, 1960Rise and shine : sunlight, technology, and health / Simon Carter. — English ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-130-2 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-130-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-131-9 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-131-0 (pbk.) 1. Sunshine—Therapeutic use—History. 2. Sunshine—Health aspects. 3. Solar radiation—Physiological effect. 4. Phototherapy—History. 5. Sun-baths—History. 6. Suntan—History. 7. Body, Human—Social aspects. I.Title. RM843.C37 2007 615.5'3—dc22 2007003197

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 130 2 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 131 9 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Limited, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

www.bergpublishers.com

For Anthony Chalwin, who always loved the sunshine

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

1 Introduction

1

2 Beyond the Pale: Sun, Danger and Delight

11

3 The Move to the Great Outdoors: Camping, Campers and the ‘Worthy Suntan’

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4 Sunshine, Hygiene and the Sun Cure: Part 1 – Rickets, Sunlight and Actinotherapy

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5 Sunshine, Hygiene and the Sun Cure: Part 2 – Tuberculosis and Heliotherapy

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6 Heliosis: Part 1 – Leagues of Sunshine

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7 Heliosis: Part 2 – Building Worlds of Sunlight

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8 Sunlight in Perspective: Pleasure, Sunlight and the Socio-sensual Environment

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements

This book represents one output of a long academic project and as such I owe debts of many kinds. In the mid-1990s I was working on a research project looking at mobility, travel and health based in the Medical Research Council’s Medical Sociology Unit at Glasgow University. Thanks are due first to the Medical Research Council for initially funding the research that made possible the foundations of this work. The specific topic of this book, the changing relationship between bodies and sunlight, arose from a conversation with John Urry who observed that given the importance of sunlight in shaping the mobility of modern travellers, it was surprising that little sociological or historical research had been developed in this area. This led me to an initial foray into the archives of old medical journals within Glasgow University library. Various aspects of this work have been presented at conferences and in seminars, and thanks go to all those who made comments or suggestions. Thanks also to Luc Berlivet, Hannah Bradby, Stephen Clift, George Davey Smith, Charlie Davison, Judy Green, Lesley Henderson, Kate Hunt, Kelly Loughlin, Mike Michael, Ornella Muscucci, Nicki Thorogood, Salim Vohra and John Walton who have all commented on previous aspects of this research and, at times, pointed me in new directions. In addition invaluable help was provided by archivists and librarians at the Bodleian Library, the Wellcome Trust Library, the British Library and the First Garden City Heritage Museum. I was also aided by members of the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. On a more personal level I would like to thank the following for their invaluable and varied types of support: Tony and Pauline Carter, Karen Clarke, George, Margaret and Lorna Henderson, Ursula Jenkinson, Mike Michael and Denise Goddard. I am very grateful for the support, encouragement and understanding from Lesley and Louis.

Cover picture by kind permission of: Olafur Eliasson The weather project 2003 Turbine Hall,Tate Modern, London (The Unilever Series) Mono-frequency light, reflective panel, hazer, mirrored foil, steel 2670 cm × 2230 cm × 15 4440 cm Photo: Jens Ziehe 2003 © Olafur Eliasson 2003

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

‘DYING FOR A TAN?’ This book is about sunlight. It is also about bodies and the myriad of entities that have come to mediate relations between the two. Today it seems that we have a rather complex association between the sun’s rays and bodies. For those people living in temperate geographical zones the sun is associated with many (and often apparently) contradictory practices, objects, technologies and artefacts. We seek out the sun in our gardens, our houses and on our holidays, yet we are told that skin cancer is reaching epidemic proportions. When we visit the supermarket or chemist we are confronted by an alarming array of creams and lotions, all offering differing degrees of sun protection, while also promising the ‘ultimate tan’. We think and feel that ‘getting outdoors and into the sun’ is something wholesome and positive – yet we are told that 80 per cent of one’s exposure to dangerous cancer causing ultraviolet rays happens before the age of twenty. When we visit gyms, health clubs or even the high street we notice equipment to produce ‘artificial’ tans but we worry if this may look inauthentic or fake. Even doing something as innocuous as buying a new fridge (and disposing of the old one) may be making the sun’s rays more dangerous and damaging to others people’s bodies. If I visit my local city centre chemist (or health and beauty retailer as they like to refer to themselves) I can count at least twenty different brand names of ‘suncare’ products. Each of these then further divides into a wide product range:1 creams, oils, mousses and sprays each with different sun protection factors (SPFs); protection for different skin types, including ones that are for ‘hypersensitive’, oily or dry skin; specialist protection for children and babies; suncreams that are waterproof; towels, creams and exfoliants to aid the application of an artificial tan; creams to simultaneously protect against sunlight and wrinkles; products to apply before, during and after being in sunlight; and even products to prolong one’s tan for weeks after the holiday has ended. It would seem that a relationship between our bodies and the sun’s rays is not advised unless mediated by these complex technologies. Looking at the shelves of this chemist one can choose from an array of artefacts that allow a particular and specific type of bodily access to sunlight – an intimate access by the partially clothed body to ‘nature’s rays’. So

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at one and the same time these products connect our semi-naked bodies to the sun, while also, hopefully, disconnecting us from the short and long-term damage that unrestrained ‘natural sunlight’ may do to us – they mediate and distribute connections and disconnections from nature (Michael 2000). But we could ask, have these products always been available or did our ancestors not need such protection? If, as we shall see, these technologies have only recently come into being, is it that our bodies have grown weaker or has the environment become more hostile? Maybe in the more distant past perhaps people were more modest about exposing their bodies to the sun? Or perhaps they used some other class of artefacts to screen themselves from the sun’s rays? Every year during the months of May through to July there is a pre-summer ritual in newspapers, magazines and even on television and radio where features and stories are run on sunlight exposure. These articles attempt to negotiate a difficult balancing act between warning of the dangers of sun exposure while also providing advice about how to enjoying ‘holidays in the sun’. These pieces commonly use titles such as: ‘for whom the tan tolls’; ‘tanning; the golden rules laid bare’; ‘killer in the sun’; ‘we’re the tanorexics’; ‘slip, slop, slap’; ‘the golden rules of safe tanning’; ‘tanning debate; what’s safe and what’s not’; ‘how much is too much’; and ‘get the right tan for your skin’. The tone of these is captured by the opening paragraph of an article from the glossy women’s magazine Vogue: ‘There’s no denying the allure of a sun-bronzed body, yet skin-cancer death rates in the UK now exceed those in Australia and anti-ageing is high on every woman’s beauty agenda’ (Vogue, July 2003, p. 77). In addition features from the summer of 2005 introduced two novel debates into popular discourses about bodies in sunshine: first, whether it was possible to become addicted to tanning (‘Tanorexics’, Daily Mail, 17 May, p. 40); and second, if the then Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair, had sported a fake tan acquired either via the bottle or the lamp (‘Tanny Blair’, Daily Star, 2005, 19 April, p. 2). Juxtaposed with these features in the popular press there are a myriad of advertisements for tanning products. The flavour of these advertisements tends to be marginally less ambivalent about sunshine but there is still an acknowledgement that an unmediated exposure of the body to sunlight would be unwise. Hence, a product marketed by Estée Lauder under the name ‘Amber Bronze’ claims to provide new ways to ‘Glamour Tan’ but also stresses the health advantages of use: ‘enjoy the sun by choosing the right suncare routine.Your suncare products may play an important role in determining the long-term beauty and health of your skin. Another advert, for the self-tanner ‘Sundaze’, appears with the strapline ‘dare to bare’ and touches on the ‘problem’ of arriving in a holiday resort without a tan: ‘to hit the beach brimming with confidence, just do the legwork first ... nowadays all the best-dressed summer bodies wear self tan’. An advert for Piz Buin from the 1990s, although simple, manages to encapsulate a number of themes. An angled white set of steps is shown against a jet-blue sky. A woman faces away from us while climbing the stairs – the wind catches her loose white

Introduction

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loincloth, the only garb she wears, allowing it to stream outward. A man wearing white trunks casually observes the scene from the foot of the stairs. The caption, in white letters against the blue sky, is ‘Practise Safe Sun’. The term used for this caption is key, as it references to health education campaigns around HIV that used a similar phrase:‘Practice safe sex’. Equivalence is thus formed between sun exposure and sensuous or hedonistic pleasures that may also hint at peril and protection. But the picture also makes reference to a past innocence conjured up by the Hellenic acropolis that this bronzed couple inhabit. Several themes can be taken from this brief case study of modern day sun protection. The first obvious remark is that this class of artefacts are located at the borders of several domains such as health, cosmetics/fashion, consumption and tourism, and so neatly emphasis the point that cultural artefacts and practices emerge out of the (re)production of various diverse heterogeneous networks. But also that the sun’s rays need to be mediated to prevent an immediate exposure of the body to either discomfort, which may blemish the body (and presumably the holiday),2 or a more distant exposure to the danger of skin cancer or premature ageing. Also implied is the idea that the body without a tan suffers from some type of absence – of sensuousness and glamour – that ‘no matter how often we’re told that the pale and interesting look is in, we still prefer bronzed skin’ (‘Body and Soul’, The Times, 25 June 2005, p. 12). As much of the above discussion implies, concerns about sun exposure have been increasing over the past two decades. Medical experts and health education materials have warned us that the idea of a ‘healthy tan’ is a contradiction and that preventable malignancy, caused by sunlight, is increasing at epidemic rates. We are advised that exposure to the sun should be avoided or at least minimized and must be accompanied by the use of a properly selected and applied sunscreen. On the other hand, a major component of the international travel and tourism industry is the movement of people to holiday locations where they can be assured of receiving sunlight. Indeed a number of major travel and tourist companies make reference to the sun in their trading names and logos. The sun unproblematically condenses and signifies the essence of modern travel and sensuous pleasure.

SUNLIGHT, DANGER AND DISCONNECTING BODIES At one moment it appears that ‘getting a suntan’ shares characteristics with other modern health risks such as smoking or drinking. The activity is associated with enjoyment and leisure and is promoted, albeit indirectly, by powerful commercial concerns such as the fashion, cosmetic and tourist industries. Like other health risks, the danger that the sun’s rays represent are temporally distant from the exposure period and one has to rely on experts for knowledge of this danger. Hence the extent ‘of people’s endangerment are fundamentally dependent on

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external knowledge’ (Beck 1992). This externalization of risk knowledge into the hands of experts means that the transmission of information about danger becomes a process involving mediators. Thus material dealing with the dangers of sun exposure can be found in diverse outlets, for instance: health promotion leaflets; features in fashion magazines; cosmetic advertisements; news features and stories; and even in the story lines of soap operas. The campaigns to disconnect bodies from the dangers of sunlight therefore take many forms and often involve local, national and international action. For example, one innovation was the ‘UV Index’. This entity was a result of an international collaboration between the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) and the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, BfS). This index is a simple measure of the ultraviolet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface in terms of its potential for skin damage. It serves as a simple numerical scale (e.g. like the Beaufort Wind Scale) that can be incorporated into local weather forecasts to alert people to the need for protective measures when exposed to UV radiation. However devices such as the ‘UV Index’, despite its eminent pedigree, has to compete with a range of cultural products that are contradictory: health promotional materials stress strict photo-protection; features in fashion magazines discuss the techniques used to achieve a ‘safe tan’; and advertisements for suntanning products tacitly promote the desirability of a ‘golden body’ (George et al. 1996). Contradictions between expert and popular discourses around health are not uncommon. Yet the case of sun exposure is distinct from the debates which concern smoking for example. Most people find plausibility in the argument that tobacco causes harm even if there may be powerful material and social reasons why some continue with the habit. But with sun exposure research has shown that even those who are aware of health education messages, and find them plausible, still continue to believe that something about a suntan and sunlight is healthy (Arthey and Clarke 1995; Carter 1997). It seems that it is possible for people to accept that exposure to the sun is dangerous, but for this to co-exist with a powerful belief that something about sunlight represents ‘good health’ and well-being. Recently matters have been further complicated as doubts about the dangers of sunlight have been voiced in expert discourse. After two decades of being told that we should avoid the rays of the sun to prevent skin cancer and other damage, a minority but widely reported medical opinion arose that we might, in fact, need to increase our sunlight exposure (Affleck 2005; Ness et al. 1999). Lack of sunlight might be implicated in both negative mood disturbances in winter (SAD) but also with a lack of vitamin D (absorbed in food and synthesized in the skin when exposed to sunlight). It has been suggested that vitamin D may protect against a range of diseases and cancers, and that reduced exposure to

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sunlight, while preventing skin cancer, may in fact increase the total burden of disease (Selby and Mawer 1999). It would seem that for health educators it is proving difficult to disconnect our bodies from the rays of the sun. Not only is there a popular discourse that treats warnings about sunlight exposure with ambivalence, but also there is an emerging medical opinion which questions sun avoidance. In addition, there are a number of entities, organizations and institutions (e.g. the fashion and cosmetics industries, the popular press, the tourism industry, etc.) which are engaged in enterprises in which the sun plays more than a marginal role. It seems that the connections between the sun’s rays and bodies are well established and durable. In other words, that the exposure of bodies to sunshine has become something of a habitus (Bourdieu 1977) – an embodiment of dispositions, preferences and cultural structures grounded in bodily practices.

SOCIOLOGY, BODIES, HEALTH AND SUNLIGHT This book seeks to provide a tentative sociological and historical analysis of how we arrived at this complex assemblage made up of sunlight, bodies and health. Of how sunlight came to have such a powerful association with wellbeing that, despite the best efforts of those that seek to forge new relations, the suntan continues a social and cultural historical trajectory that sees this artefact remain a referent of health and beauty. The underlying argument here is that in a period from the end of the nineteenth century up until the beginning of the Second World War (and especially in the interwar years) the social and material figuration of the body in sunlight changed dramatically – moving from a position where bodies were routinely isolated from sunlight to one where a photophilic relationship was established with the sun’s rays. Of course, behind this apparent simple ‘core’ trajectory lies a series of complex issues around how to account for such a cultural and material change in the heterogeneous relationalities out of which emerge such entities as the body, the sun, health and technology. The ‘sociology’ with which this account is aligned is a recent one – the (re)turn to a sociology concerned with materiality and the object (Latour 1993; Urry 2000). Within this overarching project, there is a developing view that the key interest is with heterogeneous relationalities out of which emerge such entities as the body, the sun, health and technology. The upshot of this focus upon heterogeneity, relationality and emergence is a happy indifference to traditional disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries. As we shall see with in the account that follows we must range across sociologies of the body, technology, medicine, public health, environment, consumption, architecture, fashion and culture to list but the most obvious. In focusing upon the sun, I am informed by Benjamin’s injunction (Benjamin 1992) to seek the character of an epoch in the smallest and least noticeable.

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Ironically, the sun is neither the smallest nor the least noticeable, but it is certainly, in one respect, amongst the most neglected. While there are accounts of the symbolic role of the sun (see Helfman 1974), there is little which accounts for the social and cultural mediation of the sun’s multifarious impacts upon people’s bodies. Of course, the relationship between bodies and sunlight has not been completely ignored. Epidemiology, one of the dominant post-cold-war sciences, has played a key role in recently reformulating and disturbing previous relations between bodies and the sun. In the post-Second World War era epidemiology has been characterized by the rise of the ‘Risk Factor’ – the investigation of things or processes that alter the probability of the individual or population developing disease or illness (Kuh and Davey-Smith 2004). Epidemiologists have undertaken complex stochastic analyses of comparative ecologies to examine the material and social relationships between humans, environments and sunlight. It was such studies that originally raised the prospect that sunlight may be causing harm (for recent reviews see: Brochez and Naeyaert 2000; Diepgen and Mahler 2002; Flórez and Cruces 2004) and also that sun avoidance may itself lead to ill health. Such studies are of immense importance in highlighting and warning of potential dangers to the health of populations, however they can reveal little about sunlight’s culturally and materially mediated impact upon bodies. We can begin to see that the sun as material culture – or better still, culturalized materiality – remains strangely unexplored as an element in the (re)production of various sorts of heterogeneous networks out of which emerge various sorts of cultural bodies. Embroiled within such networks are not only a variety of cultural artefacts (such as discourses about the healthiness or glamour of the tan) but also technological artefacts (suntan lotions and creams, medical texts, sun lamps, styles of housing, fashion and dress). But of course, to begin with a dichotomy between cultural and technological artefacts is highly problematic – these are inherently intertwined (Latour 1993). Better, then, to speak, for want of a better term, of sociotechnical artefacts and examine the neglected cultural role of these entities in constituting humans in sunlight. The mention of ‘networks’ should alert the reader to my critical use of actornetwork theory (ANT) as a theoretical resource for this analysis (see Law and Hassard 1999). One of the values of ANT lies in its close attention to the ways in that the circulation of texts, and other heterogeneous intermediaries, such as people, objects, technologies (Callon 1991), serve in the cohesion of different actors (which are likewise heterogeneous) to form a durable pattern of relations or a network. The method suggested by ANT has a number of advantages for this analysis. Over the last two decades ANT has been a major analytical framework for examining science and technology. One of the underlying axioms in many sociological approaches to the study of science has been the principle of ‘symmetry’ (Bloor 1976). This is the idea that no special privileged position should be accorded to accounts of accredited ‘facts’ or ‘success’. The social analyst should treat ‘fact’, ‘success’, ‘failure’ and ‘mistakes’ in the same way – indeed they

Introduction

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should all be analysed in identical ways. ANT extends this logic a step further to question the very categories of ‘science’,‘society’,‘the social’ or ‘nature’, or rather to suggest that what we often take unproblematically to be these entities is in fact an attainment of their mutual (co)production. The content of these complex entities is an empirical question that can only be answered by following the various heterogeneous actors as they go about their activities (Latour 1987). One of the more controversial moves this contemplation of heterogeneity leads to is dissolution of any a priori distinction between human and non-human. Indeed for ANT the interweaving of the human and non-human and the production of hybrids is a central characteristic of human associations (Latour 1993). However, as others have pointed out, there is something ‘not quite right’ within the terminology of the ‘network’ as used in ANT (see Hetherington and Law 2000). Thus some have critiqued earlier studies in ANT for often omitting the possibility of disparateness within aggregate actors (Singleton and Michael 1993) and for the often implied totalizing nature of the network allowing for no space outside (Lee and Brown 1994). I have therefore attempted to use the ANT metaphor in a relatively loose manner (and this will be returned to in the conclusion) that deploys notions about the indeterminate nature of entities (such as ‘sunlight’ or ‘nature’) and the empirical importance of a close pursuit of the actors. In addition an approach is called for that accepts a more fluid notion of the network metaphor (e.g. see De Laet and Mol 2000). In embarking upon mapping an exploratory sociology of the sun I feel it may be necessary to issue my own health warnings to minimize the risk of ‘injurious exposures’. First, I cannot hope to do justice to this range of concerns that will fall under the rubric ‘sunlight, technology and health’. For example, I will resist the obvious temptation to review the multifarious symbolism associated with the sun. Such cultural analysis, whilst of obvious value, could miss out on the vital role of the technological and corporeal. What interests me here is how the symbolization and representation of the sun are intimately tied to body techniques (Mauss 1985) and the corporeality of sociotechnical artefacts. I consider how the material impact of the sun upon bodies is mediated by a series of sociotechnical artefacts – such as past medical therapies, suntanning lotions and even architectural design. In doing this it becomes possible to trace some of the complex dynamics by which the nexus of sun-body-sociotechnical artefacts shift and change historically as the meanings and practices around sun, body and technology develop in sometimes contradictory ways. However I do not, nor could, claim that this account of the body in sunlight is definitive. The book that follows concentrates on a specific locality (mainly Britain and Europe) and a bounded temporal period (from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Second World War). An account which focused on a different locale (for example California or India) would have arrived at a very different analysis. Similarly, a detailed examination of a different period might have had to address a range of issues only considered in passing in my account. But even

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allowing for a different empirical focus this account will inevitably be partial because it is always impossible to capture and know all – in the end analysis is always a ‘matter of taste’ (Callon and Law 1995). My second warning concerns some of my empirical material. At various points during my research for this book I became acutely aware that some of the material I was examining lends itself to mild ridicule or humour. When using archives I would sometimes come across an advertisement, photograph or description of a practice from the 1920s or 1930s that required the suppression of a guffaw to avoid the disapproving eye of a librarian. In the main body of this text I have tended towards sobriety. Historians of medicine have long warned about reinterpreting old maladies through a perspective provided by modern diagnostic categories, and in a similar way our re-interpretation of past practices using a modern humorous idiom would not be in the spirit of a ‘symmetrical’ study – Latour may have urged us to ‘follow the actors’ but it’s probably a bad idea to snigger while doing so.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK Having laid out some of the main themes to be covered in this book and outlined something of my approach, I will now give a brief outline of the remainder of the book. The idea of intentionally exposing one’s body to the rays of the sun has, as I have already indicated, had a quite a short recent history. Chapter 2 begins by examining fears surrounding sunlight exposure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This moment of understanding about the effects of the sun’s rays on the human body was thought to cause illness, insanity and degeneracy. Medical discourses produced a direct link between illnesses such as tropical neurasthenia and sunlight. This chapter will discuss the use of practices and artefacts that stressed the need for bodily isolation from the sun’s rays (e.g. the sola topi, insulated spine pads and cholera belts). This chapter will also address the gendered nature of technology and sunlight by considering the production of female beauty contained in the adage ‘pale is beautiful’ by examining cosmetic preparations. The chapter concludes by considering the accounts of travellers to the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century who were fascinated with the more direct and sensuous physicality found in the brown bodies of locals. In Chapter 3, I begin to unpack the move away from strict bodily isolation. The chapter begins by considering the overt political and racist discourse of ‘whiteness’ as expounded by eugenicists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular it probes how this discourse both spoke of, and was in, a profound crisis. Further, an examination will be undertaken of how models of aristocratic bodily appearances, favouring paleness, fell into disfavour and became associated

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with debauchery. Meanwhile a number of outdoors movements, such as scouting and camping, began to suggest new ways in which the body might exist in nature and sunlight. In Chapters 4 and 5, I begin to explore the emergence of sunlight as a potential solution to contemporary health problems at the start of the twentieth century – specifically as a treatment for rickets and tuberculosis. The medicalization of sunlight involved the establishment of new practices and techniques, but also the enrolment of a sceptical medical establishment. The place of sunshine in medical discourse led to a boom of texts dealing with the new practices of actinotherapy (exposure to artificial sunlight) and heliotherapy (exposure to natural sunlight) and a more general popularization of the benefits of sunlight. These developments cannot be detached from the emerging discourse of social hygiene and eugenics and the implications of these are discussed at the end of Chapter 5. The increasing success of medical discourses around sunlight led to the emergence of a nexus made up of bodies, sunlight and social worlds. I have termed this assemblage the heliosis – to capture the idea of an ‘interactive stabilization’ between the knotted couplings of the human body in sunlight. Chapters 6 and 7 take this as their starting point to explore aspects of popular sunlight and sunlight architecture. The interwar years saw the appearance of social and political movements (e.g. The Sunlight League, The Men’s Dress Reform Party) that were informed by the social hygiene movement (helio-hygiene) and focused their attentions on issues like smoke abatement, dress reform and natural childbirth. In their projects the ‘sunlight architects’ attempted to build the sun’s rays into people’s living, working and healing spaces and involved the production of the new garden cities, health centres and the lido. The final section of Chapter 7 discusses the emergence of the helio-human – a heterogeneous collective formed between humans, sunlight and sociotechnical entities. This leads onto the final chapter where the concept of the helio-human is briefly explored in the context of the post-Second World War era and the increasing desire for Europeans to expose their bodies to sunlight.

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CHAPTER 2

Beyond the Pale: Sun, Danger and Delight

The idea of intentionally exposing one’s body to the sun is a relatively recent phenomenon. Indeed, at the end of the nineteenth century sun exposure was commonly regarded in one of two ways: first, for the many men serving the needs of empire and stationed overseas the sun was a danger leading to a variety of ills and even death; and, second, for women (especially those with aristocratic aspirations) sun exposure was thought to lead to discomfort and be a marker of low social status. Yet even in this period a different relationship between the sun and body was emerging. British travellers engaging in ‘cultural tourism’ to Greece, Egypt and Italy commented in their diaries and letters on the perfection and beauty of the ‘brown bodies’ they observed. This chapter will outline two moments of understanding about the sun’s rays and their action on human bodies: firstly as a tangible and real danger leading to illness and, if unchecked, death; and secondly, the sun as a material and corporeal link to a more sensuous physicality allowing the possibility of an escape from bourgeois propriety. It should be noted that the various associations between the sun and the body were then, as they still are, in a constant state of flux, and subject to change and debate. The sun’s rays have at different times and places been perceived as both a friend and a foe. The assorted and often incomplete enrolments implied by this have in turn been mediated by their own affiliated sociotechnical arrangements. While these associations often may have unravelled, at the same time this unravelling leaves its own traces that can continue to define our present relationship to the sun. There is little doubt that at the end of the nineteenth century a discourse existed which regarded sun exposure as dangerous with the axiom of bodily isolation from the sun being the prescriptive norm. The fear of bodily contact with the sun’s rays has had a long history. Indeed, Hippocrates named a particular form of paralysis where the head received a ‘blow’ or ‘stroke’ from the sun, and this is the likely source of the expression ‘sunstroke’ or ‘coup de soleil’ (Renbourn 1962: 203). The more recent history of the necessity of isolation from the sun is, in no small part, entwined with the history of colonial mobilities to the tropics and upper-class travel to the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century.

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UNDER THE COLONIAL SUN: SUNSTROKE AND TROPICAL NEURASTHENIA Europeans saw the tropics with a combination of both promise and terror (Curtin 1964), as rich sources for the acquisition of commodities but also as places rife with disease and danger. It was widely believed that the tropical climate was one origin of these hazards to health and particular emphasis was put on the evil effects of sunshine. It was Julius Jeffreys, a physician with the Bengal Medical Corps in the nineteenth century who was one of the first to attempt to account scientifically for the perceived dangers of exposure to sunlight. He believed that prevention of sunstroke was only possible if the head, neck, spine and even the abdomen were shielded from the sun, and he suggested that a ‘metallized curtain’ be incorporated into clothing (Jeffreys 1863). He also proposed an ocular theory of sunstroke in which the ‘glare acting upon the brain through the eyes, aids the action of sun upon the head and body towards inducing solar apoplexy’ and suggested that sunglasses should be used whenever possible (Jeffreys 1863). Jeffreys also did much to champion the use of the sola topi, or pith helmet, and offers one of the first descriptions of this object: ‘The next hat which I used for several years had a broad brim. It was formed of two layers of pith sola’ (Jeffreys 1863). From the late-nineteenth century the new sciences of microbiology and parasitology began to recognize a variety of plausible causes of tropical illness. Despite this the belief in the climatic origin of ill health did not diminish. On the contrary, in the first part of the twentieth century climatic theories about the causes of sickness flourished often with ‘new and sophisticated explanatory models’ (Kennedy 1990: 118). Of course, there were those who doubted the role of climate as a causal factor in the decline of Western sojourners in the tropics, for example Dr Louis Sambon, a tropical disease specialist and lecturer at the London School of Tropical Medicine, claimed that most illness in the tropics was due to malaria or tuberculosis and that virtually all illness previously attributed to heatstroke could be shown to be induced by parasites or microbes. Those who claimed otherwise were like: Squids and cuttle fish, which, being unable to fight their foes, cloud and darken the water with their ink as a means of defence. Most authors have mentioned a peculiar tropical deterioration, but no one has ever described it in definite terms, because no one has ever seen it. Heat deterioration is a phantom that is vanishing rapidly in the light of modern science. (Sambon 1898: 591) The view that microbes and parasites caused tropical illness, however, did not gain a widespread currency at this time. Rather than new scientific theories leading to a decline in climatic theories of tropical hazard, they ‘actually contributed new vocabulary and form to its expression’ (Kennedy 1990: 121).

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Many of the earlier views about the dangers of the tropical climate blurred the specific role of the sun’s rays or confounded heatstroke and sunstroke. Thus in 1872 a book on ‘Sunstroke or Thermic Fever’ claimed that the ‘only absolutely necessary, and ever-present, immediate cause, is heat, solar or artificial. It was formerly believed that exposure of the head to the direct rays of the sun was requisite, but this is now well known not to be true’ (Wood 1872: 9). Nevertheless the ill effects of sunlight in the tropics were well rehearsed in warnings issued to nineteenth-century travellers and these crystallized around the writings of one individual – Dr Chas Edward Woodruff. His most well-known work on the dangers of sunshine was the volume published in 1905, The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men. This tome was developed out of his experiences on active service as a US Army surgeon in the Philippines during the Spanish-American war and the Philippine insurrection of 1902. Many of the arguments put forward in The Effects of Tropical Light, particularly around the practices to be adopted by Western visitors, were not new or original. Even Woodruff’s main contention, that tropical sunlight weakened and impaired the health of whites, particularly ‘Aryans’, and that acclimatization by Westerners to these environments was impossible, were arguments that had been well rehearsed in the contemporary medical and political circles of this period. What was novel in the work was the eclectic range of social, political and scientific theories that Woodruff drew on to underpin the analysis. As Kennedy has pointed out (Kennedy 1990), this brought renewed animation to contemporary debates at this time over tropical climate in three important ways. First, was the link drawn by Woodruff between the dangers of sunlight and research coming out of physics on the nature of electromagnetic radiation. Sunshine was, he argued, a form of radiation in which the shorter wavelengths of light were the most dangerous. These ‘have the power to set up very rapid molecular or atomic movements, dissociating certain unstable substances ... this is called the actinic effect’ (Woodruff 1905: 17). These actinic rays, as he called them, could penetrate the bodies of those without sufficient pigmentation and damage the ‘protoplasm’ contained within cells of humans. ‘The paralysis of nerve protoplasm by short waves is undoubtedly the basis of many ... cases of sunstroke’ (Woodruff 1905: 38). Linking the dangers of sunlight to the newly emerging dominance of physics and radiation gave fresh validity to existing concerns about the dangers of sunshine in the tropical climate. The second resonance that Woodruff’s writings struck with the concerns of this period was the causal relationship he sought to establish between actinic rays and tropical neurasthenia. In the early years of the twentieth century, this illness was a recurrent problem among significant numbers of the ruling elites stationed in the colonial tropics. From the 1930s onwards the disease became less prevalent and disappeared entirely as a diagnostic category during the Second World War. The condition neurasthenia was itself a relatively new addition to the medical vocabulary and was originally suggested by the American neurologist

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George Beard to describe a wide range of nervous ailments ‘brought about by the pressures of modern life’ (Kennedy 2005: 38). According to Woodruff, the tropical variant of this malady was suffered by colonizers because their bodies lacked sufficient pigmentation to block actinic rays – once these penetrated a body they would overstimulate nerve tissues and lead to a nebulous range of symptoms including: irritability, lack of energy, lack of concentration, loss of memory, loss of appetite, headaches, insomnia, diarrhea and other digestive disorders, depression, various phobias, heart palpitations, ulcers, alcoholism, impotence, excessive masturbation by men, frequent or irregular menstrual cycles in women, ‘weediness’ in children, and, in the most serious cases, insanity and suicide. Individual doctors added their own odd additions to this inventory, among them sweating fits, presbyopia, involuntary knee jerks, and procrastination. (Kennedy 2005: 9) Indeed the amorphous nature of the disease categorization allowed physicians considerable scope in defining the symptoms that might contribute to a diagnosis of tropical neurasthenia. Thus one military physician observed the following symptoms as indicating the early stages of the condition: ‘maintaining a perfect score in bridge-party attendance, incessant novel reading, excessive smoking ... [and] malicious gossip’ (Thompson 1924, quoted in Kennedy 2005: 9). As Kennedy has pointed out, this condition was more than mere shorthand for the symptoms of colonial alienation, or an auto critique of colonialism, as suggested by some other commentators (see Anderson 1997). Rather, Woodruff and others who advocated the sunlit environment as a causal factor in the progression of neurasthenia were operating at the very intersection between the ‘domain of medical science and the domain of colonial power’ (Kennedy 2005: 3). By helping to medicalize the sufferings of colonial elites, an equivalence was formed between the nature of racial difference between colonizer and colonized, and the physical environments they inhabited. Within colonial regimes the colonizers became ill because they were out of place (or displaced) and because they were radically different to the colonized. This in turn meant that special care was required, and this could only be provided by medicine and the new specialism of tropical medicine which in turn offered solutions that benefited the colonial system as a whole. This helped to not only legitimate tropical medicine but also to make its sociotechnical practices an indispensable part of the colonial system. Thus tropical neurasthenia, with its vague clinical definition and aetiology, became part of the colonial regime by regulation, a set of pejorative behaviours in relation to both racial characterization and environmental location. Finally, Woodruff’s account of the effects of tropical light on visitors to the tropics fitted well with neo-Darwinian and Eugenic theories prevalent at this time. For him, the dominance and success of the European powers (especially

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Britain) was explained in terms of biological adjustment and environmental determinism with different ‘races’ being adapted to various regions by evolutionary pressures. The populations of the north, once they had been ‘driven there’, at some indeterminate stage in the past, developed larger heads and lighter skins. This produced the characteristic northern ‘blond’ and ‘Aryan’ peoples who Woodruff characterized as possessing progressive intellectual power, high morals and a general civilizing influence on those they came into contact with. Exposure of these ‘Aryan’ peoples to the sun’s rays would lead to a marked degeneration, and this would occur either slowly or rapidly depending on the strength of the light. For Woodruff, and his neo-Darwinian ideas about the ‘white man’s’ tolerances to light, there could be no prospect of acclimatization to the tropics: A tropical sun is always a tropical sun ... every climate on the earth is a splendid climate for the type of man physically adjusted to it by natural selection, and a bad climate for every other type of man ... Nature is a brutal stock breeder and kills off all unsuited to any climate into which they may have wandered. The destruction is slow if the difference between old and new climate is small, and more rapid the greater the difference. (Woodruff 1905: 272) The implications of this were that any permanent settlement of white peoples in the tropics was an impossibility ultimately leading to illness, insanity, death and racial degeneration. Such a position could be seen as amounting to a proposed retreat of the Western powers from their colonial ambitions. However Woodruff’s thesis was very far from a condemnation of imperialism. Rather the position outlined in The Effects of Tropical Light must be seen as an attempt to mark the limits of colonial regimes while at the same time, through its eugenic reasoning, positioning the colonizing westerners as the rightful supervisory controllers of the tropical regions. The authority of the white ‘races’ were needed to ensure that the tropics functioned to the benefit of civilization, but the price paid was illness and degeneration for those who lingered too long. While Woodruff’s account of the dangers of sunlight was primarily focused on the tropics, he also commented on the peril of light exposure in northern regions. A recurrent concern was the fate of ‘blonds’ who lived in northern cities and urban centres. Here he argued that increased amounts of light, due to glare, reflection and lack of shade were leading to degeneration and illness amongst the white inhabitants. ‘City life being suited only to those dark, swarthy people who have been city dwellers since the days of Chaldea ... it is possible to shield the unsuited blonds more than we do. Wide streets and plenty of shade trees are two necessary conditions’ (Woodruff 1905: 309). He also claimed that a variety of other disorders, such as crime, suicide, drunkenness and school deportment all increased in the summer months due to increased light exposure of the ‘northern races’. However these views, about the suitability of city life in northern regions and northern sunlight causing degeneration, were regarded as

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somewhat eccentric. Some even went as far as suggesting that they were ‘very dangerous, and one which should not be accepted by professionals without considerable inquiry’ (Todd-White 1905: 681). However Woodruff’s concerns about tropical sunlight did have significant resonance with both the views of tropical experts and the worries of tropical sojourners. The perceived affliction of tropical neurasthenia resulted in significant numbers of expatriates returning from the colonies, while medical journals, conferences and tropical experts debated the extent to which climate and sunlight might be the cause of these ills. Those westerners stationed in the tropics were constantly exhorted to wear special clothing, including insulated spine pads, tinted glasses and the sola topi. Indeed Dr Andrew Balfour, Director of the London School of Tropical Medicine, went so far as suggesting that dark underwear should be worn by those in the tropics (Kennedy 1990: 128). In addition, Western residents, as Woodruff himself recommended in his practical rules for ‘white men in the tropics’, were urged never to venture into the midday sun and to reside in buildings with wide verandas and darkened rooms. But perhaps the most striking reminder of the dangers of tropical sunlight was the sola topi or pith helmet. Up until the Second World War the sola topi enjoyed widespread use among both civilians and military sojourners (for a history of this object see Renbourn 1962). It was this artefact more than any other that was to become the ever-present fashion icon and signifier of both British colonial rule and the dangers of the ‘midday sun’ in ‘foreign’, faraway lands. The sola topi was an important sociotechnical artefact because it managed to visibly knit together an array of social and material relations. As has been pointed out, the racial boundaries within the colonial system were never as trenchant in practice as often suggested by colonial rhetoric (see Stoler and Cooper 1997) and, thus, the topi helped mark out and establish the difference between the colonizer and the colonized. But this was a difference based on a medical discourse of vulnerability to an alien environment in which the individual colonizer could only ever be a temporary but necessary visitor. While the dangers of the tropical sun were established in medical discourse there was also an established uneasiness about sunlight closer to home. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century there were frequent warnings in medical journals about the dangers of unregulated exposure of the body to sunlight. Much of the speculation in these medical writings was far less codified than was the case with the tropical sun yet there were frequent articles dealing with domestic sunstroke. Thus an editorial in The Lancet is typical of these speculative observations. Here a report was given of a meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine where investigations into the 1896 epidemic of sunstroke in New York were reported. A likely cause was thought to be blood poisoning caused by exposure to the sun: ‘experiments on animals ... showed that the blood of patients suffering from insolation contained a poison the virulence of which was as great as that of some snake poisons’ (The

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Lancet 1900a: 267). In another paper in the British Medical Journal the authors report on attempts to measure the skin and rectum temperatures of various ‘case studies’ of sunstroke. Also included were similar self-measurements of temperatures taken by one of the authors during strenuous activities undertaken in the sun (e.g. ‘after digging in the garden. No coat, waistcoat open, no hat even in the sun. Sweating’ (Pembrey, et al. 1900: 832). The paper concluded that their ‘observations were too few and incomplete to justify ... theories, but they show that the cases of the so-called “heat stroke” are complex and obscure’ (Pembrey et al. 1900: 832). Other reports were characterized by describing individual case studies. Thus the following tragic account from the British Medical Journal of August 1896 was typical. Here a general practitioner writes of the case of an eighteen-month-old boy brought to him with sunstroke after ‘paddling’ in the sea. After a month in a coma the boy eventually died. The harmful role of the sun is fully implicated in the conclusions of the article: This is but an example of the evil effects of a practice which can be seen in full swing every day at any of our seaside watering places – little children ‘paddling’ with their clothes tucked up, their feet chilled, and their heads exposed to the blazing sun. No doubt they enjoy it, but the danger it involves is very great. (British Medical Journal 1896: 343)

SUNLIGHT, DANGER AND GENDER: ‘MAD DOGS’ AND THE PALE BEAUTY One further aspect of medical reports about the dangers of sun exposure worthy of consideration is that they were gender specific in that they mainly applied to men. Of course, women were thought to be susceptible to tropical neurasthenia, with sunlight implicated in irregular menstruation, but as a rule there was considerably less visible medical attention paid to the effects of sunlight on women either in terms of tropical exposure or domestic sunstroke. This would be partially due to the structural position of women at this time: on the one hand, there were substantially fewer women stationed in the colonies who might fall prey to tropical neurasthenia and, on the other, most of the domestic victims of sunstroke were either children, were in the military or were manual labourers. Thus some have seen the perceived dangers of tropical sunlight as speaking to a crisis in colonial masculinity (see Anderson 1997). Indeed, physicians often seemed to be especially concerned with the symptoms of tropical neurasthenia that manifested as ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘deviant’ sexual activity. These ‘deviant’ activities fell into three main categories: impotence; excessive masturbation; or liaisons with local women. Impotence was of least concern as it was simply taken as further evidence of the unsuitability of the tropics for permanent settlement by the colonizers. While masturbation was seen as being self-evidently harmful

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and therefore not commented on greatly, the greatest concern was with the potential outcome of ‘interracial’ sex. This was seen as likely to accelerate the degeneration and absorption of the ‘white’ colonizer (Kennedy 2005). The medicalization of these departures from the accepted codes of bourgeois colonial behaviour further demonstrates the role that tropical neurasthenia played in regulating everyday life in the colonies. This was especially true where ‘racial’ categories might break down, as was possible if sexual liaisons were possible between colonizers and colonized. If such liaisons could be pathologized using a medical discourse that saw the underlying problem as an environmental exposure to sunlight then racial categories could be safely maintained. However while these concerns about the physical dangers of direct contact with the sun’s rays were mainly applicable to men, these were not the only fears to exist about sun exposure. Women were subject to a rather different range of discourses, practices and sociotechnical artefacts that spoke more about their bodily appearance than immediate physical danger. That the sun’s rays are responsible for producing a pigment change in the bodies of those exposed has long been understood, but the resultant ‘suntan’ has been a site of complex, and often contradictory, beliefs, feelings and values. In the period at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century there was at least one strand of thought that advised that a woman’s skin should be pale if not white. Indeed most of the cosmetics available in this period also sought to produce or enhance the pale complexion (see Corson 1972). Much of the advice to women made little reference to the sun’s rays, directly but firmly recommending a blanched appearance. However, it also seemed that women needed to tread a careful line between appearing pale while not visibly using cosmetic preparations such as white enamels. Thus an anonymous book, entitled Beauty: Its Attainment and Preservation, published in the 1880s, begins its deliberations about cosmetics by warning that whitening products ‘call into question, even though silently, the moral status of the mind’ as well as being highly toxic and injurious. However the same authors then go on to recommend their own recipe for bleaching the face that would ‘improve any complexion and it is harmless’ (quoted in Corson 1972: 376). Many of the beauty care books of this period claimed to be written by unidentified female members of the aristocracy. One such book appeared in 1902 written by an anonymous countess under the title Requisites for Beauty Care. It contained the usual advice about beauty care and deportment for women, and advised that the ideal skin tone should be pink and white. The advice in this book also warned about the dangers of exposure to the sun for a woman’s complexion. Women must avoid sunlight and sunburn by adhering to the following: There is a very simple method ... and that is never to go out in the sun or night dew or when the moon is bright, for that tans as quickly as the sun, without

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covering the face with a fine white, or better still, cream coloured veil, first putting a little glycerine on the face, and then passing a powder puff lightly over it. (quoted in Corson 1972: 400) Another book published in 1902, The Art of Being Beautiful, took the form of a discussion between a young girl and an anonymous Baroness. Within this book the emphasis was on achieving beauty through healthy pursuits and gives a hint of a changing relationship to the sun’s rays. Hence in one section the Baroness advises that: ‘Extreme pallor is at times indicative, not of delicacy, but merely of want of sunshine. The rays of the sun act upon the human being as upon the plant, they bring out the body and brightness of its hue ... open air life at mid-day is the only cure for delicacy’ (Anonymous 1902). However this same book then goes on to suggest that a relatively pale complexion is best for showing off the ‘exquisite transparency of blue veins’ and that a woman should never cover up veins because ‘she knows so well the value of them that she is apt to err by trying to accentuate them’ (Anonymous 1902). Yet, despite accounts such as this, the consensus still appeared to be that exposure to the sun was to be avoided. Thus many women’s magazines from this period stressed the dangers of the sun’s rays and the unattractive appearance that a suntan might cause. For example, in the early twentieth century the magazine Vogue often carried features and advertisements about the avoidance of a suntan or ‘remedies’ for dealing with a tan accidentally acquired. In the August edition of 1903, Vogue’s beauty expert made explicit reference to the dangers and discomfort of the suntan while also hinting that it may give away undesirable social origins: ‘The nut brown maid may be the picture of health, but unfortunately tan and sunburn are anything but poetical in real life being, on the contrary, often a great detriment to comfort as well as personal appearance’ (Vogue 1903). In the same article there was a reference to a new product for ‘softening and whitening the arms and neck ... the degrees of whiteness being easily regulated by diluting with a little rose water’ (Vogue 1903). Two decades later, in the October of 1921, Vogue was still recommending that its female readers should adopt a pale or white complexion whenever possible. If by accident or bad luck a woman should have become tanned then a treatment was recommended for the removal of tan. This consisted of the application of a paste-like bleach spread on the face and arms until discomfort was felt. After its removal less powerful bleaches were applied and then removed to be followed by the application of ‘delicious skin foods’ which were administered ‘with a rhythmic, dancing movement of the fingers that race swiftly and lightly over the face and neck’. After five or six treatments the woman was left with ‘the inevitable hint of rouge’ and no suggestion of a suntan (quoted in Corson 1972: 456).

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ARTISTS, TRAVELLERS AND BROWN BODIES So far we have considered how the sun’s rays were regarded negatively both in the discourses of medicine and fashion. The light of the sun, for those exposed to it, could lead to illness, degeneration, sexual depravity and death. For women, the effects of sunlight would be the displeasing appearance of a tan that, for at least some, was worth subjecting one’s body to the discomfort of repeated bleaching sessions in the salon in order to remove it. There is however a parallel and alternative story that can be told about relations between the sun’s rays and people’s bodies in this period. Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries travel to the Mediterranean region became a regular occurrence for a significant number of Britons. While the proportion of the British public to travel to this region was not large, and included very few members of the working classes or lower middle classes, those who did arrive at the shores of the Mediterranean were significant in terms of the impacts on the region and their influence on the emerging industry of tourism. Among their numbers were the artistic, the literary and the wealthy leisured. These people were influential in their writings and began to explore and give voice to the emergence of a new relationship between the sun and the body. This relationship to the sunshine cannot be fully understood without also understanding the motivations behind these Victorian and Edwardian travellers. Travel, at this time, was not something undertaken as an end in itself or, to put it another way, travel was not seen as a justifiable activity if undertaken simple for pleasure. Indeed, forsaking Britain meant abandoning everything that Victorians held to be dear – ‘fidelity, obedience, connubial affection, and a stable rooted existence’ (Pemble 1987: 53). To travel abroad without a greater purpose, such as colonial affairs or missionary work, was even seen as unpatriotic and ablating the national strength. Hence in 1864, the women’s campaigner and anti-vivisectionist, Frances Power Cobbe, wrote that it was ‘a poor choice to give up England ... at this hour when every voice and every arm are needed to grapple with error, and want, and sin’ (quoted in Pemble 1987: 53). Travel then was often defensively justified by the appeal to ‘worthy’ and ‘improving’ motivations. Of course some of these were mere rationalizations for motives that at the time may not have enjoyed social acceptability, but the commonest given reasons were those of health,‘culture’ or pilgrimage. Pilgrimage reflected the growth of evangelicalism and an increasing obsession with religion in the Victorian age. There was a desire to visit the locations depicted in the Bible, especially the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, the supposed site of the Crucifixion and other notable locations in the Holy Land. Thomas Cook organized excursions to these locations from the 1870s and these were typically populated by clergymen and university dons. However, of most significance for the changing relationship with the sun were health and ‘culture’ travel. Health travel was based on a belief in the therapeutic advantage to be gained from the

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Mediterranean climate; the region had been a destination for the affluent sick since the eighteenth century. As a 1911 guide to the region said of the French Riviera: This strip of paradise is, according to scientific experience, the Mecca of those afflicted with: diseases of the lungs, in its first stage, chronic catarrh of the larynx, chronic bronchial catarrh, the first stage of phthisis, emphysema of the lungs, asthma, nervous diseases, chronic rheumatism, general debility and the enfeebled convalescent condition. (The Riviera: A Practical Guide 1911: 12) We will return to the issue of health travel later but for now it is sufficient to note that the role of sunshine and the sun’s rays in bringing about an improvement in health were debated with some vigour. The role of culture as a motivation for travel here refers to the privileged position that the Victorians and Edwardians had for the ancient civilizations of Italy, Greece and to a lesser extent Egypt. This was no doubt a reflection of British art, education and architecture which elevated the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome as superior moments that might bring enlightenment to those that studied them. Thus the area of southern Europe bordering the eastern Mediterranean was one of the only places where the British went with humility to learn from others. However the ‘others’ they learnt from were the ancient peoples who were long dead, with these regions, for the most part, being seen as museum exhibits. Indeed Italy and Greece occupied a special place in the British imagination. The ancient Romans were regarded as part of a genealogy of which the British were the rightful and true descendants. If the British were the modern Romans then their inheritance was technology, war and government. Just as the Romans had recognized the superior sculpture and architecture of the Greeks, so too the British sought the Classical and Renaissance fine arts of southern Europe. This fixation on the classical worlds led to a form of ‘cultural travel’ in which British travellers visited Greece, Italy and other Mediterranean areas to visually consume the remaining artefacts of antiquity. So steeped were the Victorians and Edwardians in classical sources that travellers recognized the foreign landscapes of these lands as if they were seeing them through the ‘eyes of Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Virgil, Theocritus, or Livy . . . vision tutored in the antique school could easily discover the legendary settings in landscapes’ (Pemble 1987: 116). But as well as visiting the historic ruins and these legendary landscapes visitors also noticed the locals who lived in these regions. An assumption was made that they were the direct descendants of the ancients, who were so valued. The local populations were almost reproduced as living classical museum exhibits: Taught to see life in Greek status, British travellers looked for Greek status in life. They scanned the figures in the Mediterranean landscape hoping and

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These views were especially common among the many artists and writers who visited southern Europe and the Mediterranean region. Typical of these visitors was the portrait artist George Frederic Watts who visited Greece, Italy and Egypt on a numerous occasions. Thus in 1852, Sir Charles Newton, writing from Mitylene where he was the Consul, urged Watts to join him: ‘Why are you not here? If you could but see my cave by the seashore, where I lie all through a summer’s day, and read Shelley . . . I feel the landscape before my eyes is the landscape which Homer saw, and has described in his similes, and which Pheidias turned into beautiful impersonations in sculpture’ (Watts 1912a: 142). In the autumn of the following year Watts returned to his beloved Italy, in the company of Roddam Spencer Stanhope and Henry Prinsep. On their journey to Leghorn they visited Pisa, Florence, Bologna and Venice. On reaching Venice, Watts was moved to write to his friend John Ruskin, expressing his views about the role of sunlight and nature in painting, thus: ‘under the influence of the glowing sun every object is presented in a manner so in harmony with my own feelings and the whole language of Nature seems to me perfectly intelligible’ (Watts 1912a: 144). We can begin to see how Watts expressed a view, which found a resonance with many of his contemporaries that saw a nexus around the sun, the body, landscape and classical sources. For Watts the human body reached an idealized perfection in its classical Pheidian representations, and sunlight was part of this perfection. For him, modernity was having negative effects on the contemporary body. To be exact, modern habits, a lack of sunlight and fresh air had caused the body to lose its classical perfection as revealed within the ancient art of Greece. Thus, during the same trip, Watts observed that: It has often been said that Nature is always the same ... she is, but it cannot be denied that great modifications take place ... allowing for the effect of sun and climate – the vagabond scantily-covered tramp is not unlike the mendicant who asked alms of Alcibiades. The country boy, in his well worn smock frock, will to this day treat you to Pheidian folds. But form and colour of flesh have certainly deteriorated. The well dressed gentleman of 1854 can bear small resemblance to the exquisite of the time of Pericles: the limbs, deprived, by the fashion of modern clothing, of freedom, and shut off from the action of sun and air, never acquire their natural development, texture, or colour. (Watts 1912a: 150)

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In 1887, on his honeymoon tour, with his wife Mary, Watts travelled to Egypt and from there set sail on a seventy-day journey up the Nile.1 Watts spent most of his time drawing on the deck of the boat. Of particular interest to him were the many fellaheen working the river. Watts commented on what he saw as the physical perfection and beauty of their bodies: The further south we went the deeper the bronze colour of the people became; the Berber type especially delighted him. The features gained the refinement of bronze, the rich, warm browns so much appealed to his sense of colour that he began to think the Western complexion was quite a mistake! ... individuals of very distinctly Greek type appeared ... amongst these was a young man of remarkable beauty ... and every movement of his limbs was magnificent. (commentary by Mary Watts in Watts 1912b: 68) Indeed it appeared that Watts was not alone in seeing beauty in the tanned bodies of people around the Mediterranean. Many artists and travellers admired and even coveted the suntanned bodies of the people they saw on their travels. Within this discourse the ‘bronzed’ human form was equated with health and sexual appeal. For example: the novelist Louise De la Ramée (aka Ouida) described a Sicilian sailor drawing attention to ‘his brown cheeks, his brilliant eyes, his elasticity of step, his rapid movements, were all the signs of a perfect health and dauntless manhood’ (De la Ramée 1883) and the theme of bronzed limbs became a recurring characteristic of Ouida’s description of Italy; on touring Italy, the actress Fanny Kemble commented on the ‘beauty of form and brilliancy of colouring’ of the Italian peasantry, and claimed that the southern people were superior ‘in physical comeliness over our Northern races’ (Kemble 1847: 218); Emily Eden, the painter and novelist, writing of her stay in India said: ‘brown is the natural colour for man ... I am quite ashamed of our white skins’ (Eden 1872: 28); Dr James Henry Bennet, a physician who helped establish Menton as a health resort on the French Riviera, reported men as ‘bronzed by the Eastern sun ... muscular, hardy and good looking’ (Bennet 1875: 314); and Oscar Wilde wrote about young men on the Riviera who were ‘three lads like bronzes, quite perfect in form’ (Wilde 1962). We can here see how the tanned skin, via references to ancient civilizations, was beginning to denote a fantasy escape from bourgeois propriety into a more sensuous, sexual and direct physicality. The suntan was becoming a material and corporeal link to the ancients who were so highly valued. Yet these writings were still largely based on the observations of others bodies – even these Victorians generally avoided the sun’s rays which were still feared. Let us briefly recap. In this chapter we have talked about various actors who, in the Victorian and Edwardian era, sought to position the sun’s rays and who produced various relationships between human bodies and the sun’s rays. These actors included medical personnel, colonial authorities, clothing manufacturers,

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fashion and beauty experts, artists and novelists, and upper-class travellers and tourists. In terms of their evocations concerning the sun’s rays, the following broad list of attributes can be drawn out:           



The tropical sun causes degeneration. The sun may cause acute illness. The tropical sun may cause chronic illness including insanity. The sun’s rays make habitation of the tropics by northern ‘Aryans’ an impossibility. The sun’s rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation. Special clothing and precautions are needed by those northern people who do venture into the tropical sun. Tropical clothing (e.g. the sola topi) marks out (racial) difference. The sun’s rays in northern regions are also dangerous leading to sunstroke and death. Women, who are concerned about their beauty and status, should avoid the sun. Women should do all they could to mask or remove the effects of the sun (e.g. tanning). The brown bodies of those from the Mediterranean constitute a different type of beauty – a beauty that is at the same time classical, sensuous and erotic. The bodies of northerners are deprived of this ‘natural perfection’ – modernity has cut them off from nature, the sun and an immediate contact with their environment.

These understandings of what the sun’s rays perform on the body are by no means contradictory – they cut across each other in a variety of ways. The important point however, is that they reflect the slightly disparate goals of different actors within the establishment of Victorian and Edwardian northern colonial powers.2 For example, in terms of the functions discourses about the sun play, we find that they: establish a biological difference between colonizer and colonized; demonstrate the limits of colonization without any overt critique of the colonial system; institute and legitimate the role of the tropical medical expert; mark out, medicalize and regulate a particular set of behaviours, including sexual behaviour; build, maintain and preserve a particular conception of female beauty based on upper-class and aristocratic values; begin to conceptualize and question the beauty of others’ bodies; and to begin to conceptualize and critique the very idea of the white body. So, how do we begin to conceive of these disparate actors with their various sociotechnical discourses about the sun, sunlight and suntan? Rather than looking at these actors as some type of singularity we might consider this array of discourses as a sort of cloud. The various actors writing, speculating and observing the effects of the sun have an external, albeit amorphous, boundary but

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within this actors are diffuse, crossing each other’s trajectories, making partial connections in the process (Strathern 1991). Despite the evident multiplicity of views regarding the sun, we can note, nevertheless, at least some common concerns. For these groups of actors one immediate interest was with notions of otherness and identity. For example, in the case of Woodruff ‘the other’ was primarily the alien environment of tropics. Here the intense sunshine would cause illness in the short term, but in the longer term a degeneration of the very qualities that would give the ‘white’ northern ‘races’ their ‘essences’. On the other hand, the beauty and fashion experts were also preoccupied with the production of identity through appearance. The frequent use of anonymous aristocratic authors, and the pejorative references to ‘undesirable social origins’, implied that a patrician model of beauty was being produced in the various creams, preparations and treatments. Any exposure of the body to the sun might bring about a tan which in this case was associated with the unstated otherness of lower social orders. And finally the artistic and literary travellers in their accounts also touched on an otherness to which they had limited access. The brown bodies of others were seen as idealized links to the ancient world and a more direct sensuous physicality. This had a heavy resonance with romantic ideals prevalent at this time which saw social and material change as accelerating. The brown body was envied, not just because it allowed an access to a sensuous physicality, but because it also represented a direct link to a ‘classical past’ – to a time that was fast losing its connection to a present that was both feared and despised. The slowing, dissolving link to the past was felt as a loss – as a profound loss: ‘The French revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the corrosive cults of Reason and Utility had sundered connection with what had gone before. They had cancelled an immemorial dispensation in human affairs and cast man adrift into a world dominated by his worst rather than his better self’ (Pemble 1987: 179).

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CHAPTER 3

The Move to the Great Outdoors: Camping, Campers and the ‘Worthy Suntan’

In the previous chapter we concluded by considering how Victorian and Edwardian travellers fetishized the suntanned bodies of natives to the Mediterranean region. These bodies were often described as having an erotic significance and were contrasted negatively with the white bodies of northern Europeans. Indeed travellers frequently lamented what they thought to be key elements absent from the bodies of northern Europeans, namely exposure to the sun and open air. Within this chapter I will outline how the emergence of sunshine and the suntan began to be taken as a material indication of bodily health and psychogenic strength for northern Europeans. A variety of concerns lay behind and contributed to this gradual change in outlook. Key amongst these was an emerging sense of crisis in the idea of ‘white’ as a racial category and a general disenchantment with aristocratic codes of beauty. Additionally there were fears about the growth of new industrial conurbations and associated concerns about the ‘problem of population’ with an urban working class that was often constructed as susceptible to a drift into ‘moral degeneracy’. Young men were thought to be particularly at risk from these moral dangers with special measures being needed to protect them. These concerns will be explored in order to chart how wider ideals of pastoralism and romanticism led to the rise of discourses centring on the suntan as a visible connection to the body in nature – to a corporeal sign of ‘worthy’ outdoor activities. The move away from a discourse of the sun’s rays as dangerous, or at least undesirable for the body, was one in which the connections between bodies, objects and the sun were varied and complex. It would be a mistake to see this transition as a simple move from the sun as hazardous to one where the sun’s effects were coveted. Often these two positions coexisted and neither was ever fully displaced by the other. Indeed the history of bodies and sunlight is one of controversy and disagreement. The cultural turn away from sunlight being seen as dangerous occurred after a series of partial connections were made by multiple and diverse actors. One of these partial connections concerned the status of ‘white’ as a racial category. In the last chapter we saw how a range of sociotechnical artefacts and associated discourses produced the white body and the ‘white’ race as being

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jeopardized by exposure to the sun’s rays, especially in the tropics. However, as Bonnet points out, during the period that roughly spanned the 1890s to the 1930s, there emerged a growing imperial and social literature that marked out a growing white crisis. Within present-day public discourse the explicit celebration of whiteness would be regarded with at best suspicion, but is more likely to be associated with the reactionary ‘politics of hate’. Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a mainstream literature appeared that purported to celebrate white identity and supremacy which ‘in fact exposed the limits of whiteness as a form of social solidarity’ (Bonnett 2003: 320).

THE WHITE CRISIS Bonnet’s argument is that the moment when the discourse of racial whiteness was being most forcefully stated in public discourse, was also precisely when a crisis began to undermine the very idea of ‘white’ as a racial category. Indeed the very manner in which the argument for ‘white supremacy’ was expressed contained its own contradictory critique. For instance, one argument is that the very use of a racial discourse within a colonial system inevitably allowed the colonized also to adopt a similar discourse as an alignment of commonality against white control (Furedi 1998). While this approach may partially explain developments it also tends to highlight explicit racism rather than the crucial but implied narratives of race. Here Bonnet’s thesis proves useful in that it centres on the internal problematics within those discourses of whiteness. The coming crisis in the literature on whiteness was in large part due to ‘the extraordinary claims of superiority made on its behalf, claims that led to a profound sense of vulnerability’ (Bonnett 2003: 322). For some, such as Charles Pearson, the threat came from the demographics and economics of expansion by those colonized peoples who were about to escape their ‘tutelage’ and become self- governing. For Pearson, the expansion of the white races would inevitably lead to ‘the white man under siege’ in the face of newly dynamized ‘black and yellow races’ (Lake 2004: 42). For others the white crisis was exposed by various colonial encounters. For example, William Inge, the Dean of St Paul’s (known as ‘the Glooming Dean’ because of his frequent eugenic warnings of imminent white catastrophe), wrote in 1922 of the tide having turned against the white world at around the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. While the event was itself magnificent, ‘the spectators ... could observe the contrast between the splendid physique of the coloured troops and the stunted and unhealthy appearance of the crowds who lined the street’ (quoted in Bonnett 2003: 324). Military defeat of northern powers in disputes with non-western countries further highlighted the extent of diffidence in white supremacy. The unexpected defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war had ‘challenged and ended the white man’s expansion’ (Matthews, 1925, quoted in Bonnett 2003: 324) while at the

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same time undermining any ideal of an international white solidarity. Despite these external problems much of the literature speaking of the crisis of white identity was directed towards reflections on the ‘traitorous nature’ of peoples who were already within the northern territories – especially the working classes who were often perceived as failing to live up to the ideal of white supremacism. Indeed many of these commentators wrote of the white urban working classes (the ‘residuum’) as not even worthy of being included in the same racial categories as the bourgeoisie or the ‘neo-aristocrats’. Thus it was that Lord Curzon, while watching soldiers washing during the Battle of the Somme, would make his famous remark: ‘I never knew the working classes had such white skins’ (quoted in Bonnett 2003: 326). However, in this era, for most of the contemporary writers, the problem lay in trying to balance what was a clear contradiction – namely establishing an inclusive white solidarity while maintaining an elitist political system. One solution to this thorny issue was to use a variant of social selection. In other words the ‘best stock’ of the masses was said to have long since elevated themselves upward leaving a ‘residuum’ behind. The white elite were thus connected to the ‘left behind’ masses that were now in physical decline. This origin myth was further refined with the notion that the ruling elite had their beginnings in a rugged and pre-industrial rural England. This was contrasted with a characterization of the expanding city and working-class urban life as degenerative, draining and an enemy of the white race (see Cantlie 1906; Galton 1883; Masterman 1901). As Bonnett points out, the concern with working-class ill health at the end of the nineteenth century largely flowed from the discourse of white crisis, rather than vice versa. In fact the evidence for the declining ill health of the working classes in Edwardian Britain has been disputed (for a fuller discussion see Soloway 1982) as less of an empirical reality ‘than as a class investment in representing the proletarian as a degenerate group’ (Bonnett 2003: 328). The ‘white crisis’ literature increasingly spoke of the threat from within from the ‘subman’ (Freeman 1921), the ‘Under-Man’ (Stoddard 1922) or the ‘C3’ type (Curle 1926). These ominous figures were produced as both racially inferior but also as indications of a feared future political decay and the ultimate decline of British civilization: the ‘philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism’ which is ‘at bottom a mere rationalisation of the emotions of the unacceptable, inferior and degenerate elements’ (Stoddard 1922: 151, 203). The literature that attempted to produce a white solidarity and a white racial supremacy was often self-contradictory: while it sought to be inclusive it was also highly anti-egalitarian; while it attempted to produce a white identity it dismissed most whites as deficient; and while it acclaimed white superiority, reminders from other regions constantly problematized the white ideal. It is not just that this literature spoke of crisis; it was itself in a profound and constant crisis. From the beginning of the twentieth century the discourse of whiteness began to appear increasingly eccentric and anachronistic, a process that was to

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accelerate markedly after the First World War. Diverse elements brought about a widespread retreat from the use of ‘white’ as a useful concept or category of public discourse: within the religious and missionary community fear about a ‘world race war’ and awakenings to Britain’s ‘brutish’ past challenged the idea of white as a superior category (see Matthews 1925); emerging scientific understandings about genetics questioned the basis of ‘scientific racism’ by suggesting that race was inapplicable to the classification of human diversity; and ‘racial consciousness’ increasingly became associated with the struggle against colonial oppression. In short those actors concerned with producing texts about whiteness failed in their attempts to either impose or stabilize this particular identity on other actors. As an identity position it was inherently weak and the enrolments needed to sustain a general idea of whiteness were elusive. The literature of white crisis mainly addressed imperial and social anxieties. However the white crisis was also closely articulated to concerns over the appearance of bodies. As we saw in the last chapter there was, well into the 1920s, a set of sociotechnical artefacts and practices that sought to provide a pale and white body for northern women. Men may have been exempt from this model of beauty but were still advised to avoid the sun’s tanning rays for the fear of illness and degeneracy that might result. With the decline of the racial category of whiteness, and its failure to become a durable sociotechnical practice or political discourse in the early twentieth century, a space opened up for new relationships between bodies and the sun.1

ARISTOCRATIC DEBAUCHERY The associations between a pale complexion, whiteness and beauty were in decline by the end of the nineteenth century for a variety of reasons that were independent of the ‘white crisis’. One of these was because of a strong association between a pale complexion and ideas of aristocratic attractiveness, a discourse of beauty that was becoming eclipsed by a more widespread rejection of aristocratic values. Throughout the nineteenth century upper-class culture, particularly when linked with masculine behaviour, became seen as corrupt and unhealthy. As Mort has pointed out, by the 1830s, the ‘aristocratic codes of libertinism were beginning to be challenged, both by organised evangelical pressure groups, and by the structural shift in the overall balance of power in favour of the middleclasses’ (Mort 1987: 88). By the mid-nineteenth century the medical profession was beginning to claim dominion over matters of public health and hygiene, and endowing groups with a ‘cultural repertoire’. The professional gentry, industrial bourgeoisie and newly emerging middle classes were seen in approbatory terms and as distinct from either the ‘debauched’ aristocracy or the ‘disease ridden’ working classes.

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At the end of the nineteenth century aristocratic and fashionable London society was the target of popular literature (both fictional and in the popular press) that sought to expose the moral corruption within the upper classes. For example, the ‘Maiden Tribute’ episode provides a useful illustration of this turn against the aristocracy. In the 1880s the Salvation Army and the campaigners Josephine Butler and Catherine Booth led an unsuccessful attempt to raise the age of consent, in order to address the perceived problem of the entrapment of young women and children into prostitution. After this failure it was thought that lobbying through the popular press might be beneficial and so an approach was made by Butler to the editor of Pall Mall Gazette, an early tabloid newspaper and precursor of the London Evening Standard. There followed a series of articles under the title of the ‘Maiden Tribute’ – a highly effective piece of scandal journalism that documented the alleged trafficking of young girls to ‘aristocratic old rakes’. This series of articles resulted in an emotional response from the public with rioting outside the Pall Mall Gazette offices and a large public demonstration in Hyde Park (Walkowitz 1982). This episode, when compounded by a more general sense of a depraved aristocracy, led to a widespread sense of anger directed against aristocratic values. This was intensified by attempts by members of the House of Lords to block legislation to raise the age of consent that arose as a result of the Maiden Tribute for ‘fear that they or their sons would be threatened by such legislation’ (Gorham 1978: 366). The fears that flowed from such events led to a long-lived juxtaposition of the aristocracy with negative connotations. The developing association of the aristocracy with vice and debauchery led to a further rejection of the older aesthetics of body appearance. Thus a particular aristocratic code of beauty, the pale, untanned or artificially white skin, became increasingly linked to ideas of ill health and vice, and at odds with an emerging aesthetics of middle-class bodily health and beauty. Sometimes the link was made between the aristocracy vices inhabiting the ‘darkness’ of depraved areas of the city. For example, in 1894 there was a purity campaign waged to close the Empire Theatre in London because of the perceived alliance between the aristocracy and working-class prostitution available in the promenade area of the theatre during music hall shows. It was popularly believed that the main clientele of these music hall prostitutes were the sons of aristocrats: ‘they were the swell mob who disgraced the West-end of London and their aristocratic and plutocratic parents’ (The Morning Leader 1894). The campaign was led by Laura Ormiston-Cant, who described the aristocratic clientele of the Empire as being from the darkness and with a fear of daylight: There was the sad mournful army who minister entirely to the demands of lust, and who love darkness and secrecy because their lives and deeds are evil ... They knew that their dreadful craft is in danger when its methods and results are dragged into the broad daylight ... let them mouth out their

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Furthermore, the pallor of diseases such as tuberculosis, which had been associated with the romanticized look of distinction and aristocracy (see Sontag 1979) now became increasingly associated with illness and vice. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this was in the popular fiction of the period. The epistolary novel Dracula, written by Bram Stoker, first appeared in 1897 and recreated the mythical character of the vampire as an aristocratic fiend who preyed upon young women.2 The description of Dracula used by Stoker frequently makes reference to his pallor: His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth ... For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. (Stoker 1995, Chapter 2) The story of Dracula has subsequently been reworked and modernized in a variety of ways since its first appearance, however the central character, the depraved and pallid aristocrat, has remained relatively constant. The modern Dracula myth has also been subjected to much analysis, but one obvious feature to note – and that has been played out in many versions – is the conflict between an aristocratic past, of myth, darkness and superstition, and the emerging modern world of lightness, science, technology and middle-class professionalism.

‘ROVERING TO SUCCESS’, NATURE AND THE SUN The increasing rejection of aristocratic codes of beauty did not, of course, occur in isolation. There were several newly emerging discourses that helped to define fresh ways in which the healthy body might appear. There were worries about the growing size of urban industrial conurbations, as we saw in the literature on the ‘white crisis’, that expressed fears about the perilous state of health amongst the masses and the possible drift, by a large section of society, into physical or moral degeneracy (Mort 1987; Weeks 1981). These issues were being raised throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a variety of social movements such as the eugenics movement, the social hygiene

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movement and the social Darwinists (see Jones 1986). Foucault has identified this as the ‘problem of population’ – the increasing study of human groupings through surveys, investigations and the study of family relationships – in short by rigorous application of the techniques and practices of modern medicine, social enumeration and surveillance (see Foucault 1978; Foucault 2002). However one issue not discussed in detail by Foucault was the differential birth rate associated with British industrialization. This was not simply the sudden increase in British urban populations in the nineteenth century, but the greater and increasing rate of birth among the working classes in comparison to other groups. ‘This was an obsessive concern of the British social hygiene movement well into the twentieth century’ (Jones 1986: 37). The perceived susceptibility of young people to ‘moral degeneracy’ was the focus of particular anxiety. These were anxieties about the possible negative effects that any unchecked sexual awakening may have as the young entered adulthood. From the end of the nineteenth century there were increasing moves to break what was thought to be a ‘conspiracy of silence’ around the damaging consequences that might follow either the spread of ‘venereal diseases’ or as an outcome of ‘self abuse’ by the young. Girls were thought to enjoy a certain (unstated) protection from moral degeneracy, but boys were seen as open to sexual desires and indulgences that might work to the ‘detriment of the individual and of society as a whole’ (Hall 1991: 26). One solution to this problem was thought to be the pursuit of ‘muscular Christianity’: the idea, established in British public schools, that ‘healthy’ manliness could be obtained through disciplined and codified physical activity. The notion that informed these activities was the perceived link between physical health, manliness and morality.‘A healthy physique was more important than a veneer of social culture’ (Warren 1987: 199). Several themes were closely entwined within the ethos of muscular Christianity, including: a stress on personal health; a sensible and simple diet; self-denial towards stimulants (e.g. alcohol and tobacco); and a personal style that was honest and decent with a great stress on duty and honour. These values were often contrasted to the moral dangers associated with the enfeebling environment of the modern city, and led to calls for a new stress on the simple values of the ‘spartan life’ experienced while facing the challenges of nature. If boys could be removed from their urban environments and immersed in ‘nature’ then such surroundings would lead to a situation where the ‘emphasis was likely to be on energetic action rather than unhealthy reflection’ (Warren 1987: 200). At the end of the nineteenth century it was thought that the ideas of ‘muscular Christianity’, enjoyed by the privileged at public schools, could now be usefully extended to less privileged, boarding-school-educated, working-class boys found in the expanding urban centres. Two social movements of this period sought to introduce these beliefs to a wider group of young males: the Boys’ Brigade (established in 1872) and the Scout movement (Baden-Powell published his

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Scouting for Boys in 1908). Both these movements put a great stress on the health benefits to be gained from physical training for boys, preferably conducted in the open air. The Scout movement in particular emphasized the benefits of an outdoor life, away from the city, for the young man. The favoured training location, for an introduction to this self-discipline and improvement, was the outof-town campsite. The rural location of the camp was thought to promote two particular benefits for the young man: first, it allowed the development of the manly character whereby the boy could become a good citizen devoted to public service and honour; and second, it was thought that there was a link between ‘the healing and regenerative power of nature and the development of the whole personality’ (Warren 1987: 212). Baden-Powell commented that a boy who had experienced the adversity of living under camp conditions would find ‘if ever he goes on to service, or to a colony, that he will have no difficulty in looking after himself and in being really useful to his country’ (Baden-Powell 1910: 56). This outdoor life of physical activity was thought not only to promote a healthy body, but also a moral (which was equated with healthy) mind for those young men who might be susceptible to ‘unhealthy’ desires: Young fellows in this rutting stage are apt to get together and to tell smutty stories and look at lewd pictures ... aimless loafing encourages loose talk. If you carry out Rovering, you will find lots to do in the way of hiking and the enjoyment of the out-of-door manly activities. To get rid of the bad you must put something good in its place. (Baden-Powell 1922: 106) It was here, in the camps so favoured by the Scout movement, that an association was established between health and a direct contact with nature and the environment. In Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell includes a section entitled ‘An Easy Way to Grow Strong’ in which he recommends a series of exercises for boys to carry out on a daily basis, and that ‘it is best to carry these out naked or with as few clothes on as possible, either in the open air or close to an open window’ (Baden-Powell 1910: 187). It is also possible within Scouting literature to find references that link the acquisition of a suntan to ideas of health. Yet in this context the tan becomes a signifier of something else, not as healthy in itself. Here we can see how the tan became an indicator or marker that a young man was engaging in healthy outdoor activity. But it was more than this. The tan also represented a visible link between the body, ideals of nature and masculinity: He is a hefty Rover Scout, about seventeen years of age, that is a fellow training to be a man ... In addition to his load he carries a more important thing – a happy smile on his weather-tanned face ... he loved the open. Altogether a healthy, cheery young back-woodsman. Yet this chap is a ‘Townie’, but one who has made himself a Man. (Baden-Powell 1922: 208)

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CAMPING AND CAMPERS The temporary return to nature was an idea that not only informed the Scout movement but was also partly responsible for a revision of popular opinion about camping. Up until the end of the nineteenth century the word ‘camp’ was primarily associated with the temporary dwellings used by either the military, itinerant workers or the settlements used by populations fleeing war or unrest. As Ward and Hardy (Ward and Hardy 1986) point out, a number of factors began to coalesce to change the position of camping within popular imagination. A popular romantic literature existed which extolled the virtues of the lone outsider living a heroic life in the camp and away from the dull, predictable and disdainful life of the city dweller. Works like Mérimée’s Carmen or Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers spawned a popular genre in fiction and theatre where the camp became a place of excitement and adventure. It was also an age of missionaries and selfpublicizing explorers, with reports in the daily press and slide shows at Sunday schools of the exploits of people like Livingstone and Stanley. But perhaps most importantly, due to the needs of the empire and colonial exploration, there existed an established industry specializing in manufacturing a wide variety of camping accoutrements: ‘camp chairs, camp beds, camp stoves, camp kettles for the camp fire, Camp Coffee and Camp Matches remain from that era’ (Ward and Hardy 1986: 3). Thomas Hiram Holding was one of the first to make the translation from camping as a requirement of the military or empire, to camping as a leisure activity. At the age of nine Holding first experienced camping during his family’s unsuccessful attempt to emigrate to North America: ‘above the wooded slope on the plateau behind Kairkock, on the Mississippi, which camp lasted about five weeks’ (Holding 1908: 3). Holding took a proselytizing role with regard to camping and played a key role in the formation of the Association of Cycle Campers in 1901, and later in 1906 the National Camping Club. He also designed the first modern set of lightweight camping equipment to allow the equipment to be carried on the new safety bicycle. Holding went on to write The Camper’s Handbook in 1908. In this and his earlier work, Cycle and Camp, we find frequent references to the value of the simple life in proximity to nature: ‘exercise without fatigue, fresh air night and day, and sufficient excitement to create interest. That sounds well! Yes, and has been proved to answer when physic failed and tonics had lost their charm’ (Holding 1897: 13). The themes of bodily exposure to the sun and a return to nature were also explored in his writings on the rewards of camping. In the following extract Holding describes coming across a family scene: Here the family and their servants were spending a ‘savage’ holiday ... They were having a delightful time. The brown limbs of the children, the bronzed faces of the parents and the grown of branches of the family ... At the end of

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Both the Scouting movement and the increasing popularity of leisure camping at the turn of the twentieth century were themselves developing in parallel with wider popular movements of the time. These various popular movements could be loosely associated with the tradition of pastoralism – the ‘image of lost rural bliss and to an affinity with Nature’ (Ward and Hardy 1984: 9). This tradition, with its nostalgic overtones, sought to recreate a purer and more natural way of life. It was a ‘fantasy of gently scenery, of mellow farms and villages and of beautiful people filled with love; it is a world of perfection and harmony, of the Garden of Eden before the Fall’ (Ward and Hardy 1984: 9). This attraction was something that had been advancing for most of the nineteenth century, as superstition gave way to scientific discovery, nature in turn became something to ‘admire and discover’. This connected to wider ideals of romanticism in circulation at this time – a return to a simpler life that was nearer to nature, but one that was ‘a synthesis of intellect and emotion, of rationality and imagination’ (Ward and Hardy 1984: 11). This reification of nature was also in opposition to the perceived distortion caused by modern urban life and was expressed by writers in this era such as William Morris (Morris 1962; Morris 1974) and Edward Carpenter. Indeed Carpenter, commenting on Victorian family life, wrote: ‘Plain food, the open air, the hardness of the sun and wind, are things practically unobtainable in a complex ménage ... No individual or class can travel far from the native life of the race without becoming shrivelled, corrupt, diseased’ (Carpenter 1887: 75). Similar sentiments were also evident within the Arts and Crafts Movement which followed Ruskin’s ideal of looking to nature for both intellectual and emotional inspiration – the dominant view within the movement being that the proper place for activity was ‘in the country ... away from the complex, artificial and often destructive influences of machinery and the great town’ (Ashbee 1908: 11).3 Thus we can begin to see that a nexus was developing around the sun and its rays linking three broad sets of ideas – namely morality, health and nature. A healthy body could be produced by physical outdoor activity and this would in turn produce a wholesome and virtuous mind. Such a body would inevitably be exposed to the sun’s rays and become brown, bronzed or tanned. In many ways this discourse of the suntan was ultimately grounded in an idea of connecting to a nature that was pure, uncomplicated and innocent. The acquisition of the suntan could here almost be described as applied Rousseau – an idea that would articulate well with the ‘late-nineteenth-century love of the primitive’ and the ‘noble savage’ (Mrozek 1987: 227). Vitality could be gained by mind and body through a return to the innocence of nature. Of course, this nature discourse was implicitly gendered in masculine terms. It was the active masculine subject who was returning to the nurturing but passive female nature. The darkened

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male body, tanned by the rays of the sun and exposure to the elements of nature was the most prominent indicator that an individual had engaged in such worthy activities. In other words the suntan served as a physical marker of differentiation from the unhealthy, amoral and pallid bodies lurking in the darker regions of the city.

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CHAPTER 4

Sunshine, Hygiene and the Sun Cure: Part 1 – Rickets, Sunlight and Actinotherapy

The previous chapter developed arguments concerning the discourse linking morality and nature, how the sun’s rays became a means by which the body could become marked as having acquired good moral health. However sunlight, at this time, was also emerging as a sociotechnical solution to contemporary health problems. In short, as a giver of health in its own right. This chapter will begin to examine the practices and techniques which produced sunlight as a source of hygiene and health. To do this we will look at the widespread endeavours to enrol the medical establishment into a therapy based on sun exposure. These were used to fight a range of pathologies – with the principle target of these therapies being rickets and tuberculosis. Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, mainstream medical journals frequently discussed the issue of sunlight’s potential as a treatment for a range of pathologies. Two themes can be discerned in these sources: first, the ongoing struggle to make sunlight therapy durable as a therapeutic practice that was distinct from conventional allopathic medicine, because it was seen as a ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ form of healing; and second, the need for caution, care and medical supervision to prevent injury during sun exposure. We will see later in sections how the medical movement to establish the sun’s rays as a durable therapy was connected to, and in many ways became indistinguishable from, a wider cultural movement to establish the sun’s rays as of benefit to all – even those people not suffering from illness. However it was the therapeutic use of sunlight that established a particular discourse of health around sunlight. The medical application of sunlight was intimately connected to the trajectory of two diseases: rickets and tuberculosis. In many ways the trajectories of these diseases, when considered from the standpoint of sunlight therapy, are intimately entwined as the claims made for the advantages of sunlight treatment often conflated a number of different illnesses. However it may be useful to initially consider these conditions separately as their histories of treatment and understanding involve different specificities.

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RICKETS: ‘THE HIDDEN DISEASE’, VITAMIN D AND SUNLIGHT It is worth looking first at the case of rickets, a bone-deforming disease mainly seen in children. This was one of the great hidden diseases of the nineteenth century; hidden because it was not a certifiable death cause and thus largely escaped the attentions of the public health administration ‘whose pre-occupation was largely with the causes of death’ (Hardy 2003: 337). Even though it was, for the most part, ignored as a public health issue, the condition began to generate a literature among the developing paediatric profession. Indeed, an emerging specialism will often attempt to establish its own identity thought processes of problematization and enrolment (see Latour 1988). Securing the identification of an entity as problematic is a way that experts, professionals or scientists can then establish themselves as part of a solution – as a way of constituting their own professional identity as being invaluable. However, before the establishment of ideas about micronutrients, vitamins and the characteristics of ‘deficiency’ diseases, theories about the possible aetiologies and causes of rickets were far from unified. Within the nineteenth century various factions in the medical community, with interests in children’s health, speculated about rickets being linked to inheritance, diet, sanitary conditions, polluted air and climate. Others even hypothesized about a possible link between rickets and syphilis. As late as 1918 Britain’s Medical Research Committee, in a detailed investigation of rickets, concluded that ‘in spite of the most varied and extensive research we have practically no real knowledge of the nature or causation of this widespread malady or the factors which determine its onset’ (Ferguson 1918: 17). Despite the lack of coalescence around a unified explanation for the causes of rickets, it was widely believed to be related to urban growth following industrialization. Medical personnel investigating the problem faced the dilemma of, on the one hand, being sure that an account of the disease must be related to something about urban families with which they regularly came into contact; while on the other hand, they had a multitude of possible factors to choose from that could either contribute to or confound an explanation. Be this as it may, two broad explanations began to arise, each being based on a different causative entity: some argued the case for a correlation between poverty, poor diet and disease, while others looked towards a lack of sunshine and fresh air as a causal link. The exact mechanism by which a lack of sunlight might bring about the malady of rickets was not clearly worked out. But the idea that sunlight was needed to build up the resistance of a healthy body and thus prevent disease was beginning to be expressed in medical discourse. One origin of this idea could be found in the works of Theobald Palm, a physician who had noted the absence of rickets while on a visit to Japan – ‘he was struck with the absence of rickets among them as compared with its lamentable frequency among the poor

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children of large centres of population in England and Scotland’ (Palm 1890: 271). After conducting an extensive correspondence and consultation with medical missionaries while working in a variety of overseas locations, about the ‘habits of the people and their climate and sanitary conditions’ (Palm 1890: 272), he began to formulate a geographical theory of rickets that was informed by the new ‘chemistry of light’ and photography. Palm came to the conclusion that the most important factor accounting for differing rates of rickets was sunshine. Those places with abundant rates of sunshine and clear skies had low rates of the disease, whereas in Britain people in towns were ‘under a perennial pall of smoke, and where high houses cut off from narrow streets a large proportion of the rays which struggle through the gloom’ (Palm 1890: 272). Palm further reasoned that the effects of light upon nutrition in plants was well understood and that humans exposed to the sun’s rays might undergo a similar direct chemical action, even if the precise mechanism was not fully appreciated. Here the reasoning seemed to suggest that rickets was a form of malnutrition and that this deficiency could be overcome by exposure to sunlight. Palm recommended various solutions to address the rickets issue, including the systematic use of ‘sun-baths as a preventive and therapeutic measure’ and ‘the education of the public to the appreciation of sunshine as a means of health’ (Palm 1890: 341). The championing of the role of sunshine in the fight against rickets was taken up in the first decades of the twentieth century by two eminent and influential physicians at Glasgow University, Noel Paton, Professor of Physiology, and Leonard Findlay, Professor of Paediatrics. Both Paton and Findlay differed from Palm in their belief that the underlying cause of rickets was an infection or toxin caused by overcrowding. It was their belief that the hygienic effects of sunlight, fresh air and exercise would arrest these infections and the toxicity caused by the squalid conditions endured by many families with rachitic children. Thus Findlay in reporting on the aetiology of rickets reaches the following conclusions: This confinement of the children, which we find wherever rickets prevails, does of course deprive them of some fresh air and sunshine, and thus reduce their restive powers, but it is not entirely ... on these grounds that it exerts its baneful influence. It is due to the want of exercise which invariably goes along with ... the confinement ... We may surmise that lack of exercise and fresh air ... allows the generation of some harmful product, and so by autointoxication brings about the disease. (Findlay 1908: 17) On the other side of the debate there were those who pointed out that just as overcrowding and lack of sunshine correlated with rickets, then so did poverty and poor diet. Thus a Special Report for the Medical Research Council (MRC) by Harold Corry Mann, based on research among the families of London dock labourers, proposed that poor diet and depravation explained the progress of rickets. In a sophisticated analysis that took account of regularity of employment, family size and presence of a main income provider, he argued that the quality

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of diet was directly related to family income (Corry Mann 1922) – rickets was, according to this view, caused by low wages. In the same period, research was being carried out on a new class of micronutrients whose absence might cause illness – these new types of nutrients were to become known as vitamins. In the early 1920s Edward Mellanby was seeking to identify the role of dietary compounds that were fat soluble and which played a part in protecting against the development of rickets. These particular substances came to be known as vitamin D, which aided calcium uptake, and vitamin A, which aided growth. However the roles of these vitamins in the causation of diseases were not commonly endorsed for several reasons. First, the very idea of a ‘deficiency’ disease caused by a specific dietary lack in food was still relatively novel. Second, the differing and complex roles of these two fat-soluble compounds was still causing some confusion, even amongst those investigating their roles. Finally, because vitamin D came to be understood as either being produced within the body by the conversion of precursor molecules exposed to sunlight,1 or as being present in certain foodstuffs (e.g. fish oils), its exact role could be implicated as a factor in both ‘diet’ and ‘sunlight’ theories of rickets. Thus opponents of the dietary theory could point to foodstuffs which ‘were apparently rich in fats but that did not cure rickets’ (Jones 1986: 74). Hence in 1922, Findlay, while acknowledging the work of Mellanby on vitamins, dismissed his research and the role of poverty in the formation of rickets and concluded that ‘diet plays a subsidiary part, if any at all’ and that ‘confinement and defective hygiene are the most potent causes in the production of rickets’ (Findlay 1922: 831). While research on the role of fat-soluble vitamins in dietary deficiency proceeded throughout the 1920s, the theory of linking sunlight to the prevention of rickets continued to exercise influence. Indeed, if anything its authority increased during this period. In one of the MRC’s Special Report Series devoted to ‘The Science of Ventilation and Open Air Treatment’ the author, Leonard Hill,2 Director of the Department of Applied Physiology at the National Institute for Medical Research, reviewed the action of sunlight on the human body. Drawing on a wide range of sources Hill argued that while the precise details of the sun’s action on the human body were not known, it had been established that ‘children brought up on sunless streets and courts suffer from pallor and rickets’ (Hill 1920: 45). Much of Hill’s report was devoted to a review of the varying characteristics of sunlight in different regions, and the physical effects of sunlight on various substances, animals and plants, including a lengthy digression on the theories of Max Planck and Albert Einstein. However the overall tone is approving of the use of sunlight as a therapy to improve health and vigour: There is an Italian proverb ‘all diseases come in the dark and get cured in the sun’, and in ‘classical’ times great store was set on sunning. Pliny built his villa at Naples so as to secure sunshine at different times of day, an excellent means

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of securing open air and warmth in a sunny climate. The stimulating effect of sunlight on our feelings of comfort and happiness are obvious, particularly in the cloudy British climate. (Hill 1920: 45) This work was typical of those advocating the use of the sun’s rays as a therapy in that it sought to make references to contemporary developments in the sciences (e.g. Planck and Einstein), in order to give a framework to the theories of sunlight therapy, while also looking backward to the ‘classical’ age. Here, mention of Pliny would evoke a clear link to a classical philosophy of nature which, as we have seen, was a frequent theme among the advocates of sunshine. By the mid-1920s the debates around the relative merits of sunshine versus diet, in the fight against rickets, had developed somewhat. By this time many people with a professional interest in children’s health had begun to accept the role of micronutrients in the prevention of rickets, but rather than looking for a dietary solution they advocated the sun’s rays as the best factor for ensuring the production of vitamin D in the body (see Editorial, British Medical Journal 1926). The role of diet was still largely rejected, or at least downplayed, as an explanation. Thus Leonard Hill, while addressing a meeting of the People’s League of Health in 1925, suggested that ‘sunshine, whether natural or as produced artificially by electric arc lamps, had a most profound effect on health. Rickets in children could be cured by it, even if a bad diet were not changed during the treatment’ (reported in The Times 1925c). Hill then goes on to advocate the installation of artificial sunlight ‘baths’ in every school, with the children carrying out a physical drill around them ‘with as much of their skin exposed as possible’ (reported in The Times 1925c).

ACTINOTHERAPY AND SUNLIGHT TREATMENT As the relationship between sunshine and vitamin D became ever more durable, so too did an enthusiasm for the artificial sunlamp or ultraviolet lamp. The need for sunlamps in a variety of easily accessible locations, such as schools, hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, was being taken seriously by those with a responsibility for public health. Indeed the 1920s saw something of a preoccupation with the benefits of artificial sunlight evolving in both medicine and public discourses. One form that this enthusiasm took was in the reporting of health issues in the press, with stories about either fund-raising activities or visits to hospitals by dignitaries. Here mention of the provision for artificial sunlight was almost de rigueur. For example, a Dr Nabarro, in a fund- raising talk for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, stressed the benefits of children being exposed to a mercury lamp (The Times 1924b). When Princess Mary visited the Victoria Hospital for Children, Chelsea she was shown a ‘unique installation’ of artificial sunlight therapy in the department of physiotherapy where:

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Rise and Shine lamps of high power emitting the visual and heat rays and invisible ultra red and violet rays of mercury vapour ... to reproduce as far as possible the actual sunshine. The treatment has been especially successful in regard to rickets, and the Princess was greatly interested in photographs of bone development. (The British Journal of Nursing 1923)

Similarly when the Queen paid a visit to St Thomas’s Hospital it was noted that an artificial sunlight treatment with a mercury lamp had engaged her attention and that ‘her majesty, while watching a child undergoing this treatment, wore goggles to protect her eyes’ (The British Journal of Nursing 1925). That these visits were regularly reported in the press implies that these facilities were both newsworthy and that the equipment was a significant enough development, in terms of novelty and ‘scientific progress’, to demonstrate to the dignitaries of the day. The Times in 1925 reported the opening of the St Pancras Clinic, on Raydon Street, Highgate, the first municipal clinic devoted to artificial sunlight therapy and infant welfare. The Save the Children Fund had cooperated with the Borough Council in equipping the centre. Those present at the opening were able to witness children undergoing sunlight treatment. ‘Around the lamp the little patients, stripped of clothing and wearing coloured spectacles to protect their sight, were seated or lying.’ The treatment was provided to the anaemic, debilitated or those suffering from rickets ‘selected from among those recommended by medical officers of ten infant welfare centres in the borough’. Sir Alfred Fripp, speaking at the opening, spoke of the future possibilities for this ‘bottled sunshine treatment’ which should be extended to all children attending school as a preventive treatment (The Times 1925). This new clinic was typical of the many artificial sunlight centres to be opened in the 1920s, either attached to hospitals or as independent dedicated establishments. The increasing use of artificial sunlight in hospitals and clinics meant that this therapy began to emerge as a specialism with its own expertise and sociotechnical artefacts. The sociotechnical ensemble of the sunlamp, the clinic and the sick rachitic child managed to extend a reticular structure of action in several directions simultaneously. The sunlamp was at the same time both ‘of nature’ and ‘of science’ – it offered a cure that was linked to a philosophy of the natural stretching back to the ‘classical’ ancients, while at the same time being a sociotechnical artefact that required medical expertise and scientific surveillance for its operation. It also allowed the incorporation of sunlight in a therapeutic regime that was independent of weather, urban pollution or the seasons of northern European regions. Furthermore, it was based on an underlying theory of disease causation that articulated well with those political concerns that might not have wished to call into question the structural distribution of wealth and resources. In contrast, the dietary explanation of rickets raised questions about whether an adequate healthy diet could ever be attained for those on

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low incomes.3 These factors partially account for the rapid adoption of sunlamp therapy, but in the process the very relationship between the human body and sunlight was beginning to change and shift – the very identity of sunlight, and the bodies on which the rays acted, were rapidly moving away from a position of avoidance and fear to one where the sun was seen as a vital tonic, with the human body being dependent on its rays for a healthy life. Towards the mid 1920s the attempt to professionalize sunlight therapy was further advanced by the establishment of a journal called Modern Sunlight which after three editions changed its name to The British Journal of Actinotherapy. The name ‘actinotherapy’ was not itself new and had been used since the turn of the century to describe the artificial use of portions of the electromagnetic spectrum associated with sunlight (see Journal of the American Medical Association 1901). However the adoption of this as the title of the journal no doubt reflected a desire to establish the credentials of this ‘new science’ of artificial sunlight therapy and the promise that it might hold for the future. Thus in commenting on the new therapy, an editorial in The Times, was devoted to actinotherapy:‘so rapid has this development been, and so wide are the horizons which extend before the science of actinotherapy, that already a bewilderment exists about it in the professional mind’ (The Times 1927). The first edition of the Journal, in its opening editorial, also adopts a similar discourse of future promise and hope for the potential uses of artificial sunlight: If all that is known of ultra violet radiation – and the great deal more which is suspected – is true, then the world is at the dawn of a new era – an era of new and amazing developments in science, industry and medicine; an era in which sunlight, natural and artificial, will be bent to the uses of man with incomparable results. (Modern Sunlight 1926) Also in the same edition, another editorial complains about the slow uptake of sunlamps in hospitals. Rather than blaming specialists or hospital authorities the article claims that ‘the fault lies with the public which has not yet awakened to the importance of ‘sunlight’ ... it is the hope of the Editors that this new journal will serve to awaken that public interest which is the basis of hospital support’ (Modern Sunlight 1926). The division between the ‘public’ who were ignorant and the ‘expert’ who realized the true potential of this ‘new science’ is evident in this editorial which declares that ‘We shall from the beginning fearlessly take the position that Actinotherapy is a method of treatment which should be under the absolute direction of medical men and women alone, and under no circumstances be left to the administration of nurses, masseurs, or other lay operators’ (The British Journal of Actinotherapy 1926) This separation of a scientific expertise with knowledge of sunlight treatment from a largely ‘ignorant’ lay public can be seen as a form of institutional identity reshaping via a ‘political packing process’ that can be set out in the form of a quasi-syllogism:

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Rise and Shine You/your children/all British children want to be free of disease. (Interressement) We, the experts/specialists (in Actinotherapy), can help you become ‘disease free’ and strong. (Translation) Now grant us our autonomy; support us in our endeavours; listen and learn from us. (Enrolment) (adapted from Michael 1996: 54, 111)

However, while this may have been an institutional strategy on the part of those medical professionals interested in practising the methods of actinotherapy, it was not entirely successful. Indeed far from the public being ignorant about artificial sunlight there was a widespread and popular interest in the subject that largely appeared to be independent of the efforts by actinotherapists. The attempted enrolment by actinotherapists was neutralized, not because of public disinterest or resistance, but owing to the ease with which the professional grouping of actinotherapists could be bypassed. In other words they had failed to become a convincing or durable ‘obligatory point of passage’. For instance, in the 1920s, stories about artificial sunlight frequently appeared in the press. One account that featured regularly were experiments at the London Zoo involving the exposure of the monkey house to artificial sunlight: ‘when the artificial sunlight was turned on a startling change occurred; the marmosets were first to realise the sudden improvement in the weather; they immediately ran up to the wire to the top of the cage, and hung in a cluster . . . bathing themselves in the warmth and light’ (The Morning Post 1925). This feature was then reproduced in an advertisement raising money for the treatment of children by artificial sunlight at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital; ‘the experiment of applying artificial sunlight on monkeys ... has begun ... thousands of little children are crying out for similar treatment, but are debarred from getting it because we cannot obtain the few thousand pounds we require’ (The Times 1925b). Another report from the same era recounted the installation of artificial sunlight apparatus at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for the benefit of actors at the theatre. A short inaugural ceremony was held on stage at which Sir Alfred Butt referred to the increased efficiency which was expected to result from its use and Sir Alfred Fripp reported that he knew several prominent actors ‘who had been greatly benefited by artificial sunlight baths and who paid two guineas each for them in the West-end’ (The Times 1925a). In addition, a variety of publications frequently carried advertisements for artificial sunlight apparatuses manufactured by a wide variety of companies. Most of these could be purchased directly by members of the public. Many of the advertisements repeated the importance of medical supervision while also making it abundantly clear those members of the public who wished could purchase specially designed lamps for the home to be used without such supervision. An advertisement for the Ajax ‘Sunlight’ Apparatus was typical. In a full-page advert there are several Ajax lamps pictured around the edge of the

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page, including specialist lamps for ‘exclusive’ medical use and others suitable for home use. In the centre of the page are several line drawings showing family groups enjoying the rays of these lamps next to testimonials, from such worthy publications as The Lancet, about the quality and benefits of the lamps. The text under one of the family portraits claims that ‘all members of the family including the youngsters and even the babies as well as invalids and the aged can enjoy a health giving Sunshine bath at all times or just when required or even all day long’ (Ajax Ltd 1928). Similarly the British Hanovia Quartz Lamp Co. Ltd. advertisements appeared with the banner headline ‘keep fit – keep young’ arranged around a picture of five naked men facing away from the camera and playing catch with balls. The text stressed the positive effect of sunlight on the skin and how the covered skin ‘becomes flabby, anaemic and unhealthy’ and how the most ‘potent agent for influencing the condition of the skin is light’. The person who uses one of these lamps ‘will soon feel the beneficial influence on his skin and his general condition, while his powers of resistance to disease will be increased’ (The British Hanovia Quartz Lamp Co. Ltd. 1926). Despite the best efforts of those campaigning for the use of artificial sunlight in the battle against rickets, by the end of the 1920s, the debate appeared to be moving against them, at least as far as mainstream medical opinion was concerned. A report written by Dora Colebrook and published in 1929 by the Medical Research Council in their Special Report Series gave the results of an experimental study of several hundred children (Colebrook 1929). The study involved studying three groups: 101 children were exposed to an artificial sunlamp; 94 children were exposed, under the same conditions, to a similar lamp but with a filter to remove ultraviolet rays; and 92 children received no special exposure to any lamp. The findings of the study were unequivocal and concluded that no particular advantage could be identified for the group exposed to the artificial sunlight source, and the ‘subjective’ opinion of the parents and teachers of the children was that the filtered lamp group (i.e. the ‘placebo’ group) had the most favourable outcome. In the following year the British Medical Journal published an extended review of Alfred Hess’s ‘Rickets including Osteomalacia, and Tetany’ written by Edward Mellanby (Mellanby 1930). In this article Mellanby, clearly exasperated by the continuation of a debate he considered long ago settled by the scientific evidence, lays out the case for the delivery of Vitamin D via diet: With all the good in the world, even if we were prepared to go about naked, we would find it difficult in England to procure from sun enough ultra-violet radiations to keep our bones straight ... It cannot be too much emphasised that rickets can be completely prevented ... if sufficient vitamin D is included in the diet from birth, and pre-natally. Mellanby concludes his article with the following statement:

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However, the debate about the benefits of sunshine was very far from over. While the actinotherapists’ project for the enrolment of medicine and a wider public into the health benefits of sunlight may have been incomplete and partial, they already had a number of notable successes. Many clinics and hospitals had already invested in sunlight apparatus and, as we shall shortly see, the battle against rickets was only one of the ills that the devotees of sunlight argued could be addressed by the rays of the sun. In this period the advocates of the benefits of sunlight were operating on many fronts and had allies both within and outside the medical establishment. Thus a close reading of the ‘Preface’ to Dora Colebrook’s report for the MRC reveals a Council that was somewhat more equivocal about the benefits of sunlight therapy than the report itself suggested. Thus it was argued that vitamin D can be delivered by mouth or by ultraviolet rays and that ‘the choice between the two methods can be decided on grounds of economy, convenience and certainty of application, which may vary with change of circumstances’ (Medical Research Council 1929: 2). The preface goes on to note that there is a body of scientific opinion that presupposes that exposure of the body to sunlight ‘excites a general systemic reaction of such a kind that the natural powers of resistance by the body to infection are somehow enhanced’ (Medical Research Council 1929: 2) and that, due to the difficulties of ‘scientific investigation’, this report would be unable to reach an opinion on this issue. In addition, while broadly endorsing Colebrook’s findings the Council also explains at length the experimental limitations and contingent nature of Colebrook’s study before warning against using the findings to condemn other types of sunlight therapy: The Council indeed quoted good evidence in their Annual Report for some particular therapeutic effects of value. It would be no more legitimate to generalize the application of Dr. Colebrook’s negative results, obtained under particular conditions, than it would be to suggest that, because ultra-violet radiation will cure rickets by a known process, it will probably have a beneficial effect on almost any condition of defective health. Each claim for a particular remedial effect of a particular form of light treatment ought to be considered on its merits. (Medical Research Council 1929: 5)

CHAPTER 5

Sunshine, Hygiene and the Sun Cure: Part 2 – Tuberculosis and Heliotherapy

With the story of rickets we examined a disease that was largely hidden from history until it was made visible by a conjunction of factors. These included: the trajectories of emergence associated with the complexities of the new vitamins; the rise of new professional groupings, first around paediatrics and then the new ‘science’ of actinotherapy; and public disputes between experts over the correlations between sunlight, vitamins and diet. In contrast the history of tuberculosis reveals a disease that, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was both a growing public health concern and was prominent in the public imagination. It killed significant numbers of people largely, but not exclusively, among the urban poor. In addition it was regularly portrayed in fictional genres such as opera (e.g. Puccini’s opera La Bohème and Verdi’s La Traviata) and literature (e.g. in Jane Eyre, Celestine, Nicholas Nickleby, and tuberculosis sufferers were frequently referred to in nineteenth-century Russian literature). However the relative visibility of the tuberculosis epidemics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not mean that the disease followed a single and easily defined trajectory. Nowadays in the West, with the luxury of both temporal and geographic distance from major epidemics, we can often view tuberculosis as if it is a single and immutable entity – the ‘further one stands from the disease of tuberculosis, the more it appears to be a single, uniform phenomenon’ (Bowker and Star 1999: 165). Yet this disease, like many other chronic conditions, becomes an elusive and fragmented entity when closely encountered, for example; it was known by a variety of both colloquial and scientific names, including: consumption, phthisis, miliary tuberculosis, prosector’s wart, wasting disease, white plague, scrofula, king’s evil and graveyard cough; it presented in different ways, sometimes acute or chronic, or sometimes intermittent with varied symptoms (e.g. loss of weight, fever, pallor, cough, unstable pulse, night sweats, irregular appetite, and spitting of mucoid phlegm and blood); and while an infection of the lung or pulmonary tuberculosis was the most common form, tuberculosis also infected the lymph nodes (‘king’s evil’), the skin (‘lupus vulgaris’), the bones, joints or spine and the brain (‘tubercular meningitis’). Indeed up until the 1890s these various

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presentations were regarded as separate conditions by medical observers and even taking the commonest form, pulmonary tuberculosis, we find the disease fractures into numerous and disparate manifestations in practice. Moreover, any account of tuberculosis incorporates the biographical stories of both real and fictional sufferers, and the partial connections their narratives make when intersecting with the infrastructures and bureaucracies of medicine and science. In short, tuberculosis escapes analysis because its story involves ‘the interweaving of myth, biography, science, medicine, and bureaucracy’ (Bowker and Star 1999: 165). Due to the elusive nature of tuberculosis it is difficult to accurately know the incidence of this disease, but evidence indicates that in the centuries immediately before 1850 it is likely to have killed as many people as all other endemic diseases combined (Hatcher 1986) and some estimates suggest that up to 20 per cent of all deaths of adults were attributable to this cause (Smith 1988). From the mid nineteenth century all forms of tuberculosis began to go into decline.1 However, for the first half of the twentieth century it was still a major health problem with significant numbers requiring treatment.2 But more worrying than the numbers of people that succumbed and eventually died from tuberculosis was the fact that the disease had such a stubborn and mercurial hold on the collective imagination – it was both mysterious and terrifying (see Sontag 1979). Until the invention of streptomycin in the 1940s the matter of an appropriate clinical treatment for TB was a subject of much controversy and the elusive character of tuberculosis also applied to the many cures proposed for its management. As Bowker and Star argue, ‘disease is in a sense ... always local and so is its cure’ (Bowker and Star 1999: 168). The treatments for tuberculosis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were varied and included surgical interventions, drug and mineral therapies, and a disparate range of unregistered and alternative therapies. The potential remedy offered to the tuberculosis sufferer was normally only dependent on local practice and the whim of physicians. Many were highly invasive, extremely painful and either offered small chance of remission or were associated with high mortality rates.3

SANATORIA AND HEALTH SPAS Before treatment was standardized in the mid twentieth century on the use of combination drug therapies based on streptomycin, a common course of action for the tuberculosis sufferer was a retreat to the sanatorium. The sanatorium was a descendant of the health spas found in Europe since the eighteenth century and followed a regime of spa-based ‘cure taking, nature worship and the new physiology of lung weakness’ (Smith 1988: 97). As Smith has observed the modern sanatoria movement was underpinned by two beliefs. First was the discovery made by Naegli that ‘tubercular lesion could heal spontaneously’

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(Smith 1988: 97). It was reasoned that changes in a sufferer’s way of life (after the onset of illness) may have led to the subject taking more rest and spending time outdoors. This would, it was contended, lead to a larger intake of air, a greater appetite and therefore an improved diet. If these conditions could be reproduced therapeutically a cure might be possible. The second notion was that the frenetic pace of modern life might ‘exacerbate consumption and that removal to a salubrious environment could cure or arrest the disease’ (Smith 1988: 97). The similarities between these ideas and the discourse of nature discussed previously are clear. Both considered modern urban life as unhealthy and endorsed spending more time outdoors away from the malignancies of urban life. A strand of the sanatoria movement additionally saw exposure to sunlight as in itself a curative agent with ‘hygienic’ properties. Tuberculosis then was an infamous disease that rapidly became elusive and fragmented when examined – it was simultaneously widely prevalent and local. A durable and widespread network existed for the tacit exclusion of tuberculosis sufferers to the sanatorium, yet no durable and widespread system of remedy or even classification of the diseases existed. Treatments for tuberculosis were, in a sense, always local and while there was much discussion about the correct treatment of the sufferer there was not the same diametric opposition into two camps that characterized the debate over rickets. However there was a division in approach between those practices involving invasive surgical procedures and those practices based on more naturalistic methods. Thus the aspiration to use the effects of the sun’s rays for a curative aim represented a move towards a more ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ form of healing – the body could be changed without the intervention of drugs or surgery. It has already been noted that the sanatoria movement was largely underpinned by a nature discourse, which must have been due partly to the origins of the modern sanatorium in continental Europe, where the establishments had flourished since the 1860s. Throughout nineteenthcentury Europe (especially Germany) naturalistic healing had been developing alongside science-based medicine, and enjoyed a popular following. For example, one German association, known as the Priessnitzbund, stressed ‘the importance of light, air, sunshine, and water in maintaining human health and treating disease’ (Proctor 1988: 225). Membership of this organization had grown from 19,000 in 1889 to 148,000 in less than thirty years. The interest in naturalistic forms of healing such as the use of sunlight marked both a desire for a return to a pre-industrial society and away from the ills associated with urbanization, but also a belief that something was amiss with the direction in which medicine was heading. We will examine this in more detail at the end of this chapter but for now it is important to note that there existed a feeling that medicine was moving in the wrong direction, and this was felt by both a significant group of practitioners and by others outside the medical profession. This loss of faith in medicine was partly due to the profound changes that were occurring to the institution at the turn of the century. Among these

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changes were: moves to greater professionalization with the adoption of a more ‘scientific’ problematic; the increasing involvement and regulation of the state and the birth of modern ‘state medicine’; and the increasing role of medical professionals in the enumeration of populations. But it was also due to medicine’s failure to provide a cure for the chronic ailments of the period, foremost amongst which was tuberculosis. These factors taken together could be characterized as an emerging crisis in the development of modern medicine in this period. It was this crisis that allowed a space for alternative treatments to develop, such as the sanatorium sun cure.

HELIOTHERAPY AND THE SUN CURE The treatment of illness, using the direct rays of sunlight, was known as heliotherapy. Its use for the treatment of tuberculosis was tentative and controversial but despite this it represented an important branch of medicine in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. One of the first scientific reports of the use of sunlight to treat tuberculosis appeared in 1890, the same year that Palm published his theory about sunlight and rickets. This was an account by König of his attempts to treat peritoneal tuberculosis with the sun’s rays in Germany. This involved a radical procedure in which the patient’s abdomen was opened and exposed to sunlight (Roelands 2002; Ziegelroth 1895). A few years later, in 1893, Finsen in Denmark began his famous experiments with sunlight therapy in the treatment of lupus vulgaris. He switched to the use of concentrated ultraviolet radiation from arc lamps and treated several hundred patients suffering from tuberculosis. For this he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1903 (Montgomery 1903). Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century mainstream medical journals began discussing the issue of heliotherapy. Advocates used articles in journals to discuss and justify this form of treatment. Several themes can be found in these discussions but two are particularly striking. First, there was an ongoing struggle to make heliotherapy durable as a therapeutic practice – one that was distinct from allopathic medicine. Second, while it was believed that sun exposure was beneficial and healthy, it was still thought to be a hazardous activity in which caution, care and above all medical supervision was needed to prevent injury themes that were also common to actinotherapy. Therefore, there was, in this period, much concern with the development of a technique that would reduce the perceived hazards of sun exposure. As has been noted above, part of the attempt to establish heliotherapy as a durable therapy relied on its articulation to ideas of nature and naturalistic practices. This was something that was stressed in one of the first reports on the use of ‘sun baths’ in a British journal. In 1892 The Practitioner carried a report by two doctors who had visited Veldes in Austria to investigate ‘Light as a

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Therapeutic Agent’ (Blacker and Clarke 1892). The paper describes a small clinic for sunlight treatment,‘or to use his own expression [the clinic owner’s] “for the cure”, of chronic diseases by means of light, air, and water, baths, attention to diet and exercise’ (Blacker and Clarke 1892: 273). The clinic described appears to be fairly typical of those commonly found on continental Europe, especially in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The daily routine for patients undergoing the ‘cure’ is described in detail. This involved rising ‘with the sun’ and taking a flask of milk, a small loaf of wholemeal bread and a jar of honey, and ascending a local hill to the summit by foot. The ascent is carried out in bare feet with ‘the rest of his attire being gradually removed as he walks on the dewy grass and passes through fir plantations, until the summit is reached in a state of absolute nudity’ (Blacker and Clarke 1892: 274). Once at the summit, after ‘partaking of the frugal repast’, the next hours would be spent in outdoor activities. On descent from the summit the actual sun bath would commence: On reaching his hut he rests until the time arrives for him to present himself at the bath-house for his first ‘sun bath’ (between 10am and 1 pm). This is nothing more or less than a modified Turkish bath, the heat of the sun taking the place of artificial heat, and the whole surface of the body being exposed to the action of sun-light. Whilst taking their baths the patients lie in a row, on the roof of a wooden house, hidden from the gaze of the curious by a fence ... After roasting for some twenty to sixty minutes, turning from time to time, so as to expose completely the surface of the body to the light, and in order that a not too extensive blistering of any one portion of the body may not occur, the patient is then wrapped in several folds of a thick blanket and left in the sun for another ten minutes. (Blacker and Clarke 1892: 274) The detailed description of the regime at the clinic involved a simple life lived close to ‘nature’. The food consisted of fresh fruit and vegetables, wholemeal or rye bread and the avoidance of all rich or stimulating substances such as meat or alcohol. The actual sleeping accommodation consisted of huts that were open on one side, ‘the result being that the occupant practically lives in the open air’ (Blacker and Clarke 1892: 275). In addition, the fact that no drugs were used in the treatment of the patients was stressed. This basic regime, of exposure to ‘healing sunlight’ and ‘nature’s’ open air, and avoidance of stimulation, was very similar to that adopted by Dr Otto Walther’s sanatorium at Nordrach, in the Black Forest, which opened in 1889. At this institution the regime was somewhat stricter and patients were required to submit themselves to the discipline of patrolling nurses who strictly enforced rules about diet, bedtimes and exposure to the elements. The Nordrach regime, as it became known, had an immense influence on British therapeutics and many British sanatoria adopted versions of these practices. However the outdoor-life regime adopted at British sanatoria tended to be performed with some variability.

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The private and middle-class establishments provided the full sun-exposure regime, with patients wearing few items, or no clothing at all, for periods of the treatment. Yet at other sanatoria, and often those operated on a charitable basis for poorer patients, an outdoor life was made mandatory, but patients were allowed to remain clothed. However they often looked ‘frowsy, their clothes always damp and muddy, the women’s hair straggly ... the men’s trousers became frayed ... the women’s cardigans and skirts were soon shapeless’ (Smith 1988: 117). According to doctors working at these establishments the middle-class patients were more willing to expose their bodies to sunlight (Rollier 1922), but this was also no doubt related to the more favourable climatic locations of private establishments for sunlight exposure.

HELIOTHERAPY AND THE MICROBES The establishment of heliotherapy in sanatoria was also accompanied by discussion in medical journals of possible underlying reasons for the positive effects of the sun’s rays on health. Thus in 1894 The Lancet carried an editorial concerning the ‘hygienic value of sunlight’ that stated that ‘we know as a matter of daily and convincing experience that sunshine is an indispensable condition of health, and that its influence upon disease is potent and far-reaching’ (The Lancet 1894). Again here there was an emphasis placed on how sunlight treatment was not drug based because ‘in wasting diseases ... the sun’s rays, as we all know, are among the most important of remedies, and the “sun-bath” will sometimes succeed in cases where the Pharmacopoeia fails’ (The Lancet 1894). However, while stressing the naturalness of sunlight the editorial is also keen to establish the ‘scientific basis’ of the therapy. A detailed explanation is given of the powers of bacteria to multiply at an exponential rate and how sunshine has been shown to be ‘by far the most important of all agents in preventing the development of bacteria’ (The Lancet 1894). The power of sunlight to destroy the tubercle bacillus was an aspect returned to in another paper of the period in the British Medical Journal of 1899 by Theodore Williams, Consulting-Physician to the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, Brompton. After briefly outlining the Nordrach regime,Williams then writes on the importance of climate and sunshine for the destruction of bacteria: the great objects of open-air treatment – namely, exposure of the patient to light and sunshine – can be best enforced where these elements abound ... It must be quite obvious to everybody that climate, for instance, of Egypt offers more advantages for open-air life than that of Great Britain. If there is anything in ... researches on the influence of sunlight and air on the tubercle bacillus, it is to the effect that sunny climates are inimical to the parasite. (Williams 1899)

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Williams further observes that sunlight treatment is more likely to succeed where climatic conditions are associated with ‘pleasure and comfort’ (such as in Egypt or the French Riviera) but does concede that ‘it is a great blessing that openair treatment can be practised efficiently in this country also [Britain], as its advantages can be gained by all classes of the community from the highest to the lowest’ (Williams 1899). These journal articles are typical of those from this period with their references to the powers of sunlight as an agent in the fight against bacteria. Latour has observed how the forces that make up society were radically altered in the nineteenth century by the mixing into society of new entities – the microbes (Latour 1983; Latour 1988). The authors of these journal articles, advocating the use of sunlight in the treatment of tuberculosis, could be thought of as attempting to become the spokespersons for both the microbe and sunlight. The microbe was at this point still a relatively novel entity and the authors speak of its considerable power: ‘a single bacillus is capable, under certain conditions, of bringing forth a progeny four times as numerous as the population of London in so short a period as twenty four hours’ (The Lancet 1894). Medicine was powerless against something as small as the microbe but a defence could be had by calling on the ‘hygienic’ powers of sunlight. However sunlight was itself a danger leading to sunstroke and degeneracy (see Chapter 2) unless administered with extreme care by those experts who could assess and know its dangers – the heliotherapists. Yet such a positioning was only partially effective because the microbe and sunlight were untrustworthy allies in the project to make heliotherapy durable as a treatment. In part it was necessary to convince and enrol a sceptical medical profession to the benefits of sunlight treatment, but there were also problems with many microbes that appeared as resistant to sunlight as they were to other treatments for tuberculosis. But perhaps the most serious issue was with the sun itself. How was the sun to be disciplined and enrolled into a treatment based on its rays in an area of northern Europe well known for inclement weather and long winters? One solution to this was an enlargement of the scope of the project. If the sun could not be relied on to provide ‘rays’ on demand then all the light that was provided must be deployed with efficacy. Here attention was turned to the state of housing in cities and large towns where many of the ‘tenements were no better than dungeons from the point of view of the provision of light’ (The Lancet 1900b). Thus a copy of The Lancet in 1900 reported on a paper given to The Tenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography by Monsieur Emile Trélat, a founder of the École Spéciale d’Architecture and ‘a well known authority on hygiene’. Monsieur Trélat claimed that the health-giving properties of light were now established and ‘insisted on the action of the direct rays of sunlight in preserving the health of urban populations’ (The Lancet 1900b). In particular, he urged that attention must be paid to town planning and sanitary reform in order to make the best use of sunlight all the year round, with dwelling rooms being ‘placed in communication with the high heavens. Let the walls be pierced and

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the widows raised up to the ceiling’ (The Lancet 1900b: 842). Again the microbes were called on to support the discourse of sunlight and health: ‘Bacteriological experiments have shown that the air near the ground is loaded with microorganisms, the number diminishing as we ascend ... This state of things would be altered if the sunlight were admitted properly on all floors, for sunlight is a powerful bactericide’ (The Lancet 1900b). Another way of addressing the problem of climate and the unreliable appearance of the sun’s rays was by moving the sufferer of illness to locations where uninterrupted sunlight could be guaranteed. Up until the outbreak of the First World War most accounts of heliotherapy concerned the clinical administration of sunlight therapy outside Britain. Locations were along the French and Italian Riviera, in Egypt or in the Swiss Alps. Reports in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet covered health resorts located in, among other places, Cannes, Bologna, Leysin, Hyéres and Helouan (British Medical Journal 1909; British Medical Journal 1914; British Medical Journal 1915a; Tomkinson 1908). These papers, like those discussed above, often emphasized the bactericide properties of sunlight before going on to give details of some of the practical aspects of treatment by the ‘unmodified direct exposure’ to the sun. These accentuated the need for gradual exposure under strict medical supervision because to ‘expose the whole body to the influence of unmitigated sunshine, without preliminary acclimatization, would inevitably lead to disaster’ (British Medical Journal 1915c: 1014). But they also began to establish that the tanned body, modified by the sun’s rays, was itself healthy and ‘hygienic’:‘To return from a holiday with a well-tanned skin, whether it be from seaside or mountain tops, has always been regarded as the outward and visible sign of sound health. Sunlight in each case, together with wind, has been the agency by which such hygienic perfection has been brought about’ (British Medical Journal 1915b). However not everyone in the medical profession was convinced of the benefits of sun exposure. Thus in 1909 an editorial in the British Medical Journal comments on the observed hazards of certain continental practices: ‘A number of persons who have suffered from the damaging effects of prolonged exposure to sunlight ... In these cases the persons bath first, then lie for a time on sandy banks of the river or lake, then go into the water again, and so on for many hours’ (British Medical Journal 1909: 1300). In this period, while sunlight therapy could be found at British sanatoria, it was clear that the preferred option for the victim of tuberculosis was to travel abroad to a European health spa. Yet the prospects for many of these travellers were not good: some were sent in the advanced stages of tuberculosis so that their physicians could be rid of them; others indulged in keeping late hours, drinking, gambling and parties that hastened their decline; and those with limited funds were often consigned to north-facing rooms or dormitories, without sunlight, and unable to afford the many ‘extras’ such as nursing, disinfection or meals taken in their room (Lowe 1888; Smith 1988). Besides this, many of the fashionable

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health resorts on the Mediterranean, especially those on the French and Italian Riviera, were undergoing significant transition from catering to the needs of the wealthy patient, to catering to the needs of the even wealthier tourist. Menton, on the Italian and French border, was an example of this transition. Throughout the later half of the nineteenth century Menton was so renowned as a destination for consumptives that Guy de Maupassant described it as an ‘ante-room’ to death. Yet as early as 1902 letters were appearing in The Lancet lamenting the fact that hotels in Menton were boycotting invalids and this was seen as unjustifiably harsh. This boycott was because: Of late years ... Menton has become distinctly fashionable and consequently almost as expensive a residence as Nice or San Remo, though less so than Cannes or Monte Carlo. Then its proximity to the latter place has made it popular with many frequenters of the casino who for obvious reasons prefer not to actually live under the shadow of the palace of fortune. (Reynolds-Ball 1902) This, as we shall see later, was a precursor to a more general shift in the status of many spas from health to tourist resort. Nevertheless the rays of the sun were able to make the translation from a sociotechnical entity tied into the networks of medical treatment to networks of pleasure and tourism.

HELIOTHERAPY IN BRITAIN In Britain one major impetus for a developing interest in home-based heliotherapy was the effect of the First World War. The war effectively cut the affiliations of British patients to the Swiss sanatoria which were never fully re-established in the post-war era largely because the visa requirements of the Swiss government became labyrinthine and the exchange rate was unfavourable for even those of moderate means (Smith 1988). Thus the post-war years saw a renewed growth of interest in heliotherapy by physicians based in Britain and this was demonstrated by the publication of a number of textbooks on the subject. One of the first of these was a translation of Dr Auguste Rollier’s publication based on his therapeutic works with sunlight in Leysin, Switzerland. Rollier had opened a clinic there in 1903 to use sun exposure for the treatment of tuberculosis and rachitis. The textbook based on his experiences of administering sunlight treatments was first published in 1914 in French as La Cure du Soleil. This was first translated into English in 1923 and appeared under the title Heliotherapy – with special consideration of surgical tuberculosis. The book was reprinted several times in the 1920s. The first edition carried forewords by Henry Gauvain and Caleb Saleeby, both of whom became major figures in

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the promotion of sunlight exposure in the inter-war period. Gauvain, who was the medical superintendent at the Lord Mayor Treloar Cripples’ Hospital and College, framed his foreword with a eulogy to the benefits of sunlight: It is ingrained in healthy mortals to love light ... the darkness of the tomb is synonymous with complete cessation of response, with death ... terrestrial life craves the golden rays. They are the world’s great tonic which stimulate and enliven. (Gauvain foreword to Rollier 1927: xi) By this time Gauvain’s own approach to the treatment of tuberculosis using sunlight had secured him a reputation as an expert on the subject. He opposed radical or invasive surgical methods as he believed these to have a high mortality rate. In addition they caused much distress and a ‘deplorable and unavoidable crippling’ (Bishop 2004). Instead he developed a more ‘natural’ and ‘holistic’ approach to healing based on the use of sunlight. Similarities between his methods and those of Rollier, in Leysin, meant that he was well placed to praise the techniques of his Swiss colleague: He is the High-Priest of modern Sun-worshippers. To those unacquainted with his great work it will come as a revelation; to those familiar with it, it is a great inspiration. His methods are of the highest interest, their value being due to the fact that he stimulates rather than supplants the efforts of nature to defend the body against disease. (Gauvain foreword to Rollier 1927: xii) The main text of Rollier’s work was dived into a number of sections dealing with dosage, technique and clinical results. However the book begins with a lengthy chapter laying out the historical roots of heliotherapy. Here the author seeks to establish that the ‘sun cure is as old as the earth’, has its origins in antiquity with the Method of Herodotus and was later taken up by Hippocrates (who was noted to have exposed his patients to the sun). Rollier then traces the history of sunlight therapy to the present day via: the sun cults of pre-history; ancient Greek mythology; the Roman solarium; Arabic medicine using sunlight to improve the immune system; Chinese solar healing cults; and Rousseau’s writings on nature. The need to establish a genealogy of the sun cure that stretched back to the ancients was a common theme amongst those wishing to establish heliotherapy as a reputable treatment for chronic forms of illness. As we saw with actinotherapy, there was a simultaneous desire to link the use of the sun’s rays to both the ancient civilizations of the past and to new developments in the sciences – sunlight therapy could simultaneously point both to the past and to the future. Thus, in the main body of the book, Rollier begins to outline his technique for the treatment of those suffering from tuberculosis. One theme that is explicated frequently is the need to tailor the treatment to each individual patient: ‘no

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other method requires such a meticulous and strict individualization and exact adaptation to different cases as the sun cure does’ and that the ‘success or failure of the cure depends’ on this (Rollier 1927: 39). This would necessitate a lengthy examination of a variety of vital signs and during this period of observation the patient must remain confined to bed. Once the actual exposure to the sun commences there is again a warning to adhere to the fundamental principles of ‘strict individualization and careful graduation’ (Rollier 1927: 41). The sun treatment would then start typically by exposing the feet for short periods. As the time of exposure was increased so too would the body be increasingly uncovered. Finally the whole body, apart from the head, could be exposed for several hours at a time, with a target of four hours in winter and two hours in summer. While the main focus of the Rollier treatment was tuberculosis, its value was not confined solely to this disease. An entire section of his book is devoted to the use of sunlight to treat a range of other conditions with the emphasis always being on how the treatment will increase the patient’s own ‘natural resistance’ to diseases. The exact means by which sunlight is supposed to increase the body’s powers of resistance is not explained in detail. However several underlying assumptions for adopting the sunlight regime are offered and these tended to articulate well with other contemporary discourses around sunlight treatment at this time. Thus, one principal reason for using the sun’s rays was that they were a ‘highly efficacious tonic and the best roborant’ because of their ‘powerful bactericidal and sclerosing tendencies in addition to their analgesic and absorptive properties’. There were also references to the deleterious effects of the human body being covered: ‘we replace the human skin into its natural environment, from which it has been alienated for centuries’ (Rollier 1927: 48). Finally, a reference was also made to the powers of sunlight to act as a nutrient for the body: ‘the skin ... obtains through its integumental cover all those yet little known substances which become accessible to mankind in the sun and air bath’ (Rollier 1927: 49). Rollier’s work had a significant influence on the international development of heliotherapy and was frequently referenced in the coming years in both scientific texts and popular accounts of this form of therapy. Several motifs from this work were carried forward into later works. Thus there was a constant reference made to the origins of sunlight healing occurring in the classical period of antiquity and often with particular notable figures being mentioned as having used sunlight therapy (e.g. Herodotus, Hippocrates and Pliny). This desire to show a lineage of the therapy to the ancients connects to the value put on the classical period at this time, as discussed when we examined early nineteenth-century travellers in Chapter 2. But it also served to separate the practice from other contemporary approaches then used in medicine. This will be considered in later sections in more detail. In addition, the importance of treatment being geared to the individual patient was also noted and how this required the careful supervision of medical experts. If the treatment was successful then sun’s rays had the power

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to increase the ‘natural’ resistance of the human body to fight infection by itself. Indeed there were even some suggestions that sunlight therapy should be more generally applied as a prophylactic against infection, particularly in venues such as schools and hospitals. In the years that followed there were numerous publications concerning the new heliotherapy. Leonard Hill had already endorsed the benefits of actinotherapy, arguing that both artificial and natural sunlight were fundamental sources of hygiene and that diseases are often the result of ‘ill-feeding and confinement indoors, a medley of unhygienic factors, one of which is the absence of sunlight’ (Hill 1920: 45). Now he published a number of works on the benefits of sunlight for the human body, most notably a published lecture to the Dental Board of the UK (Hill 1927) and a book entitled Sunshine and Open Air (Hill 1925). These follow the familiar themes of tying sunlight therapy to the civilizations of antiquity – in this case the Pharaoh Ahknatan and Queen Nefertiti were mentioned – while also establishing the scientific credentials of the therapy. With regard to the establishment of the scientific basis of heliotherapy Hill devoted a large section of his book to a detailed exposition of the new science of atomic physics and radioactivity. In particular, Hill concentrates on the supposed atomic and electrical action of light rays as they fall on various surfaces: ‘The electrical phenomena accompanying any form of vital activity indicate that electrification is part of the basis of protoplasmic structure ... It is on this complex that ultra-violet rays play with their power of discharging electrons and producing ionization’ (Hill 1925: 78). However the effect of light on the human body was, according to Hill, more than a mere surface effect because: ‘The ultra violet-rays act by producing inflammatory reaction with determination of more blood and lymph and lymphocytes to the part and by altering the immunizing power of the body’ (Hill 1925: 81). Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the health benefits of sunlight and heliotherapy continued to be promoted in mainstream medical journals by those medical experts working in the institutions using these techniques. The frequent references to the origins of sun healing in the ‘classical’ period of antiquity continued. Thus Henry Gauvain, in the 1933 Hastings Popular Lecture to the British Medical Association, stressed the continuity between the modern practice of sun exposure and the sun-baths taken by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans:‘for ages physicians have recommended the value of sunny climates, and have recommended sunny districts to their patients’ (Gauvain 1933: 1483). Alexander Cawadias, a physician at the St John Clinic and Institute of Physical Medicine, where Leonard Hill had been the Honorary Director of Research since 1930, made a more overt appeal to the founders of Hellenic medicine by tracing the origin of the sun cure to Hippocrates: The work of Hippocrates on air, water and places, represents the first textbook of physical medicine. This great physician emphasized the action of the heat of the sun on wounds, fractures and tetanus, and in his treatise on

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diet he advises obese individuals to go about naked, to expose themselves to air and sun. Sun baths formed part of the hygiene of the ancient Greeks . . . The object of the ancient Greek physicians was to help the constitution, the physis, in its fight against disease. They found that physical stimuli helped the constitution and that of these physical stimuli sun, air, water and movement were the most important. (Cawadias 1936: 211) Cawadias then goes on to outline an opposition between the underlying ethos of heliotherapy and the supposed dangers of modern allopathic medicine. Particular caution was urged towards pharmacotherapy (chemotherapy) and the practice of medical enumeration. Both of these aspects of medicine were seen to represent a ‘modern decadence’ in that they failed to consider the patient ‘as a whole ... we have to deal with whole individuals, and as individuals differ essentially from each other they do not lend themselves to statistical comparison’ (Cawadias 1936). This was a similar sentiment to that found in Rollier’s work on heliotherapy, namely that unlike other therapeutic practices, heliotherapy must focus on the individual and their tailored care rather than prescribing treatments on the basis of disease presentation. The medical discourse of this period highlighted not only the benefits that the sun’s rays might bring to the individual, but also spoke of the dangers that unrestricted exposure might pose. Frequent references spoke of the need for careful monitoring of the body because sunlight was a ‘tonic, and like all tonics must be wisely employed and not abused’ (Gauvain 1930: 475). The urging of caution was a common focus for discussion around heliotherapy, as was the need for strict medical supervision. In establishing heliotherapy as a durable medical practice its advocates have to take care not to undermine their own status – after all the sun is freely available to medic and lay person alike. Thus an article, in a 1929 copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association, compares sunlight to the medical use of other types of radiation: ‘sun rays, like x rays and radium, possess the property of doing harm, instead of the good which is desired of them ... The universally tanned skin takes many weeks to attain’ (Rosslyn-Earp 1929: 475). Much of the information from this period concerning the appropriate regime for sun exposure follows this example in urging gradual exposure and avoidance of the midday sun. Indeed much of this advice would be recognizable today in the health education advice given to travellers and tourists. Despite these warnings, there was still an underlying ethos within many of the publications that sunlight worked on the exposed individual at a systemic level. Thus exposure to sunlight would benefit the sufferer of diseases like tuberculosis by increasing their resistance and aiding the body’s own defences in the fight against illness. However, the implication and underlying logic of many of these accounts is that the healthy body would also benefit from sun exposure. This was stressed by another advocate of sunlight therapy, Leonard Dodds who wrote extensively on sunlight therapy in this period, including several journal articles concerning sunlight therapy and a book entitled Modern Sunlight (Dodds 1930).

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Within these works Dodds always underlines his key message that both natural and artificial sunlight are tonics: The evolution of the sciences of light brings us naturally to the logical developments which have been made in the last two or three years ... All forms of rickets and many forms of tuberculosis readily respond to irradiation ... the most remarkable therapeutic use, however, is general irradiations of the whole body given as a tonic to maintain health at the highest standard of efficiency. (Dodds 1928: 232)

POPULARIZING HELIOTHERAPY However, the interest in heliotherapy was not restricted to medical books and journals. Just as with actinotherapy there was a growing public interest in the health benefits of sunshine, and this was reflected in the popular press of the period. The Times was a particular advocate of heliotherapy and actinotherapy. From the early 1920s there were enthusiastic articles reporting on the treatments provided by Rollier. In The Times, the publication of Rollier’s book on heliotherapy was heralded by a comparison of his methods for the treatment of children with those to be found in British hospitals: The dingy ward ... the pale, stricken faces of children, many with the ‘unhealthy beauty’ of the consumptive, the endless series of operations ... the piteous cryings ... the terrible deformities ... Compare that picture with this one ... an Alpine village, sheltered among fragrant pine tress ... children naked, plump, and brown as earth itself, playing games or lying, healing in sunlight. Laughter – the good laughter of returning health. (The Times 1923b) Juxtaposing a traditional medical approach, performed in a ‘dingy ward’, leading to crying, pain and suffering, with the methods of Rollier in which brown children play, laugh and return to health was a common theme in reports of sunlight treatment. However, just as with the medical texts, there are clear reminders here that this was ‘no mere’ casual sun-bath but rather ‘an exact science which has been built up with infinite care and resource’ (The Times 1923b). Readers were warned that those living in cities were unable to tolerate even brief exposures to the sun without medical supervision. This article also stressed the importance of developing a ‘suntan’ because the change in skin colour must be secured for the healing to take place: ‘The connection between this pigmentation and the outlook for the invalid is a close one; when for some reason the dark colour refuses to appear, suspicion of some deep seated trouble at once arises. When it does appear improvement may be looked for’ (The Times 1923b).

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The British Medical Association annual conference was also reported and here accounts were given on the progress of sunlight treatment (The Times 1923a). In another story a report was given of the First International Health Conference organized by the People’s League of Health, at Wembley, where a whole morning of the proceedings was devoted to a session on ‘Air, Light and Water’ with Henry Gauvain presiding and Rollier as the guest speaker (The Times 1924a). The debate concerning the benefits of sunlight even extended to the letters page with some readers of The Times being prompted to extol the benefits of heliotherapy while at the same time warning of the need for caution: Owing to the encouraging investigations and widespread pronouncements of many eminent investigators the subject of heliotherapy is now receiving the public support it merits ... My personal experience has been of such a nature as to justify the most optimistic of outlooks, but it has taught me at the same time that sunbathing must not be indulged in indiscriminately but always with the greatest caution ... and, whenever possible, under the guidance of a medical man. (Barker 1924) On 22 May 1928 The Times carried a special edition entitled the ‘Sunlight and Health Number’. This special supplement was around thirty pages long and carried features on every aspect of heliotherapy and actinotherapy, including stories on: heliotherapy, winter sunlight, schools in the open air, sunlight and home decoration, garden cities for sunlight, open-air culture in Germany, artificial sunlight apparatus and industrial hygiene. There was also an extended review of all the possible health resorts that people could visit to enjoy sunlight, including: the spas of Great Britain, the Riviera, Spain, Switzerland, Algeria, Egypt, Vichy, Aix-Les-Bains and the Canary Islands. However the diversity of articles presented in this special issue go far beyond a purely medical interest in the benefits of sunlight. Indeed some articles focus on forms of home decoration and architecture that could be used to complement the effects of sunlight. Moreover the features on health resorts were obviously aimed at the pleasure seeker as much as the invalid, with information about casinos, shopping and sports. The ‘Sunshine and Health Number’ editorial, however, retains a serious focus on the health benefits of the sun’s rays and frames the use of sunlight as a ‘new science’. This editorial follows a familiar pattern of first establishing the long history of sunlight therapy with current usage being ‘a rediscovery of knowledge which at one point of history was widely disseminated’. The editorial then goes on to establish the scientific credentials of sunlight treatment because it is ‘based on observation and on study which belong peculiarly to the present stage of the evolution of science’. Finally, the need for caution is stressed because ‘sunlight treatment is medical treatment in the strictest sense of the term and ought to be given only by physicians who have devoted special study to it’ (The Times 1928b).

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The feature immediately following this opening editorial seeks to establish the general significance of the health benefits to be gained from sunlight by making much of the increased mortality rates during the winter months in Britain. A number of graphs and charts are reproduced showing mortality rates by the month of the year plotted against the amount of sunshine. According to the author these demonstrate that the ‘days of darkness are also the days of death and disease’ (The Times 1928a). This represents a change in focus that can be discerned in both medical articles and popular reports. In stressing general mortality rates, rather than simply focussing on tuberculosis or rickets, the discourse of sunlight was subtly changing from an entity of benefit to those suffering from specific illnesses to one that would be of great benefit to all. Sunlight, according to the helio-advocates, was an entity that would favourably enhance the body’s strength and resistance to disease – it was becoming a ‘hygienic’ force for the good of all humanity.

MEDICINE, PUBLIC HEALTH AND SOCIAL HYGIENE: TOWARDS THE ‘SUNLIGHT SOCIETY’ We have seen that those recommending sunlight, both artificial and natural rays, made a variety of claims about the benefits of this resource to enhance and improve the health of the population. The first step of the helio-advocates in the establishment of sunlight as a durable treatment was often to address the genealogy of their therapies. The manner in which they did this was by folding the time of sunlight into a simultaneous past and present. Heliotherapy and actinotherapy were both spoken of as rooted firmly in the past of the ancients, who were so highly valued, but also as holding a great promise for the ‘scientific’ future of ‘hygienic’ health. As Serres has pointed out,‘time doesn’t always develop according to a line and thus things that are very close can exist in culture, but the line makes them appear very distant from one another’ (Serres and Latour 1995: 57). Thus the helio-advocates fold the ancients, from a bygone classical civilization, onto the future of ‘scientific progress’. Indeed they often went even further than this by attempting a deep folding of time onto the distant biological past, a time when humans were in their ‘natural’ unclothed state, allowing their limbs to be bathed in the sunlight of pre-history. By using these folds in time they establish the sun as an entity that can begin to gather together and interweave a diverse range of elements from the technical, the social and the natural in order to make the practice of sunlight therapy durable. Thus the folding of sunlight onto the distant past helps establish its ‘naturalness’ while also allowing for the therapy to have a ‘scientific’ present and future. Simultaneously equivalence is forged between the strengths of the ancients and the possible implied strength for present peoples who may expose themselves to the ‘hygienic perfection’ of

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the sun. However the helio-advocates always position themselves at the very nexus of these complex foldings – as the experts who would manage and control these ancient and modern forms of radiation. Yet the growth of popular, medical and scientific interest in the health benefits of sunlight did not occur in isolation. The development of both heliotherapy and actinotherapy occurred in a period when the relationship between medicine, scientific specialism and the state were being radically redefined. The emergence of discourses, sociotechnical artefacts and practices associated with sunlight therapies cannot be disassociated from the changes that were taking place in this period. Indeed heliotherapy and actinotherapy were fully intertwined and enmeshed in the wider changes that were occurring to medicine in the first half of the twentieth century. Within the nineteenth century significant sections of the medical profession, especially those who practised at the London voluntary hospitals, could be described, using Lawrence’s term, as moving within a patrician social order – a wealthy order with aristocratic and royal connections. The practice of medicine was based on patronage, with many doctors being employed in rewarding private practices with additional charitable work, and teaching at voluntary hospitals. Work practices ‘depended on face-to-face encounters to maintain and promote social relations. It was a social order institutionalised at some of the great London voluntary hospitals, in Harley Street houses, at the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the University of Oxford’ (Lawrence 1998: 96). Within this social world the practice of medicine was characterized by a ‘celebration of bedside diagnostic skill, a cautious attitude to instrumentation, and the holding of specialization in disdain’ (Lawrence 1998: 94). However, after the start of the twentieth century medicine began to undergo profound changes and these changes accelerated with the end of the First World War. The physician’s professional identity began to undergo a transition away from a gentlemanly ethos and towards ideals of professionalism based on a standardized academic training and certification. The teaching of doctors was undergoing quantitative, as well as qualitative changes, with a marked increase in facilities for higher medical education. In addition, the very way in which medicine was being practised was shifting away from concerns around vitalism, humanism, individualism and synthesis, towards an approach characterized by academics, professionalism, materialism and systematic scientific analysis (Cantor 2002). In other words, the discipline of medicine was moving towards a modern biomedical paradigm with increasing fragmentation into an ever greater number of specialists, who were then publishing more and more medical research. The reification of laboratory disciplines closely related to medicine, such as bacteriology and microbiology, and the increasing role of instrumentation and pharmacology, introduced new complexities. There was also a move towards the state occupying a greater role in many aspects of medicine including: the establishment of the Ministry of Health in 1919; the increasing state collection of

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public health and clinical statistics; the development of national health insurance; and the bureaucratization of the clinical profession. Many people both within and outside medicine welcomed these changes and the ‘prestige of medicine had never been higher and the prospects of further scientific advance appeared almost limitless’ (Lawrence and Weisz 1998: 5). Yet there were those who were less optimistic about the future of medicine. While there were significant changes and much action had been in evidence, there did not appear to have been a corresponding increase in therapeutic efficacy. Diseases like tuberculosis, while slowly in decline, were still mostly untreatable and killed large numbers of people. For many practitioners the rise of specialisms and laboratory diagnosis threatened the autonomy of the physician and the traditional patrician doctorpatient relationship. Thus in response to the increasing biomedical orientation towards clinical questions, there was a move towards ‘alternative’ approaches from within mainstream medicine. It is difficult to map out these alternatives precisely as they came from a variety of intellectual traditions and practices, both external and internal to medicine. Some drew on specific or partial elements of the emerging biomedical sciences and the developing orthodoxy (e.g. Darwinism) while others expressed an outright opposition to the ‘way medicine’ was heading – many were ‘bricoleurs, putting together distinct packages for specific uses in varying contexts’ (Lawrence and Weisz 1998: 16). However the social and medical movements relevant to an examination of heliotherapy and actinotherapy can be broadly described using the labels of ‘social hygiene’ (Jones 1986), ‘medical holism’ (Lawrence and Weisz 1998) and ‘neo-Hippocratism’ (Cantor 2002). Social hygiene was itself a fusion of several nineteenth-century concerns, most notably around sanitary reform and public health. As the concern about public health became formalized, within both state and voluntary bureaucracies, it became possible to use statistics to study the incidence of endemic diseases and underlying rates of mortality and morbidity. When examining the great outbreaks of cholera and typhus in the nineteenth century it soon became evident that there was a strong link between material measures of social class and mortality, with particularly high rates of infant and maternal mortality in the poorest areas of the newly emerging industrial cities. There was much speculation about the possible causes of these differential rates of ill health and some looked towards the social, environmental and material conditions of the poor. However the habits and domestic management of the underprivileged were also blamed. It was a short step from this to looking for hereditary explanations for the ill health of the poor (Jones 1986). Indeed the fusion of evolutionary and sociological theories led to the common view that evolution might be going backwards (Soloway 1990). Thus the final element of social hygiene was a strong eugenic component. The core ingredients of the movement were never developed into a coherent theoretical model; rather they were a series of interlocking ideas to be drawn on in a piecemeal fashion. But the stress on hereditary arguments, about poverty

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and ill health, sat well with the connection drawn between national economic efficiency and the good health of the population within social hygiene. In short, many of the ills of the new urban industrial conurbations could be blamed on the poor and what was seen as their inadequate breeding, rather than any structural problems due to the distribution of resources within an industrialized economy. Hygiene, then, held a far wider meaning than we would normally give the term today. Rather than simply referring to the exclusion or sterilization of microbes, hygiene encompassed any measure that might help resist a possible weakness or failing on the part of the individual, or within a wider population. Thus if we reconsider the debates over the aetiology of rickets, the arguments against poverty as a causal factor, put forward by Paton, Finlay and Hill, was that this disease was due to poor hygiene amongst the poor. Further implicit in their argument is the notion that the poor were inefficient in managing their own domestic affairs. Hygiene here refers to a constellation of factors including infections and overcrowding, but also the ability of the mothers to manage their children and the domestic environment. Sunlight, fresh air and exercise could here be called upon to bring ‘hygiene’ into the lives of the poor and it was this that would strengthen their health rather than improvements in diet. Two health-reform organizations that had their foundations in the social hygiene movement are of relevance here. First, the People’s League of Health which was established in 1917 by Olga Nethersole after she became concerned with the unhygienic conditions of working-class homes – ‘I knew that slums breed disease, moral and physical’ (Nethersole cited in Jones 1986: 28). Its aims were wide ranging but included Imperial regeneration, eugenics, improvement of youth and immigration control, along with a desire to improve the nation’s housing, sanitation and nutrition. However another central interest of the League was the promotion of sunlight as a way of improving hygiene. Both Leonard Hill and Henry Gauvain were members of the League and addressed public meetings on the benefits of sunlight. At the first annual general meeting of the People’s League of Health in 1922 the importance of sunlight was given a prominent place by Caleb Saleeby, another member of the League: ‘Sunlight prevented certain complaints of children and ... it was not only a great antiseptic, but was of great food value, and of value in banishing disease. The motto of the league should be – “Back to the light”... The restoration of sunlight to our children would be the greatest task of hygiene’ (Saleeby quoted in The Times 1922). In 1924 the League made representations to the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, at the House of Commons in order for the government to consider resolutions passed at the People’s League of Health First International Conference. Both Leonard Hill, who had addressed the conference, and Caleb Saleeby spoke to the Minister of the important benefits to be gained by sunlight exposure. Hill commented on the importance of sunlight being admitted to dwellings and Saleeby spoke on the need for smoke abatement to prevent winter sunlight being curtailed (The Times 1924c).

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The second society with an interest in promoting the use of sunlight was the New Health Society established by William Arbuthnot Lane in 1926. This group focused on improving the nutrition of the nation and this reflected the specific theories of its founder – that many modern diseases were caused by poor diet and ‘intestinal stasis’. Therefore, the Society concentrated its efforts on trying to educate the public about how to best obtain a proper diet. However, hereditary factors ‘as well as diet were considered to influence the nation’s health and both were considered to have been adversely affected by urban growth’ (Jones 1986: 29). As well as the concerns of nutrition and the negative effects of urban growth, the Society promoted the idea that sunlight exposure had a nutritional value and might be a valuable way to supplement a ‘proper diet’. For example, the New Health Society was active in promoting the invention of ‘Vitaglass’ in the 1920s. Vitaglass was a form of glass, invented by Pilkington Brothers, which allowed ultra-violet rays to pass through unhindered – normal glass blocked this element of sunshine. Thus in 1926 the New Health Society hosted a press conference at the London Zoo to mark the experimental installation of Vitaglass in the animal houses. Dr Belfrage used the occasion to explain that the Society was putting a high value on the invention of this new glass: ‘ultra violet consisted of invisible rays ... It had been proved that they had a stimulating effect on general growth, power of resistance to disease, and on the richness of blood ... ordinary window glass ... was quite un-transparent to the health giving ultra-violet rays’ (The Times 1926b). The installation of Vitaglass was recommended for all schools and hospitals, and advertising materials for the product claimed that it had already been installed in 200 schools and 300 hospitals. The New Health Society also advocated the resettlement of rural areas by the urban masses, or at least the provision of allotments and gardens to the urban poor. This would accomplish several objectives simultaneously: it would allow the consumption of a natural diet produced directly from the land; it would allow continued exposure of the urban masses to sunlight and fresh air; and it would expose the masses to conditions of ‘hardness’ in which the fittest would excel and be ‘naturally’ selected. Underpinning this was the idea that these measures would cleanse society of ‘the discontents and unemployables who clog the wheels of progress, create disharmony and foster revolution’ (Henning Belfrage (1926) quoted in Jones 1986: 29). Thus we can see that helio-advocates as well as folding time also folded space and place – the poor must be moved away from the ‘degenerate’ and feared cities to the rural areas from which they had originated in the past. This folding of time-space allowed the gathering together of a diverse range of entities into one common frame. The assembling of diverse entities – the ancients, nutrition, strong bodies, science, vitamins and hereditary fitness – allowed the consolidation of new relations around the sun and sunlight. It was hoped that these new helio-assemblages would not only make Britain strong but that sunlight might itself somehow palliate the urban masses that might have been inclined to ‘foster revolution’.

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The social hygiene movement might have had somewhat grand aspirations – an attempt to remake multiple social worlds to their own designs. The ‘medical holists’ and ‘neo-Hippocratists’ might have had more parochial aims that involved trying to merely reformulate the medical agenda in the first part of the twentieth century. Be that as it may, some of their activities had a powerful resonance with those of the social hygienists, and were also of importance in the story of sunlight and health. One of their principle concerns was with the direction that medicine was heading and, in particular, the move away from the generalist skills of the patrician physician. Thus, one of their first enemies was what was seen as a reductionist turn in medicine which was often associated with laboratory practices. In response to the perceived tendencies of biomedical and allopathic medicine there was a desire to accentuate holistic approaches to the body and the individual patient. The first site of dissonance was the body. If the biomedical focus was on the fragmented body (e.g. specific organs or microbes as the site of illness) then the holistic approach was to direct attention to the systemic body, ‘privileging the general state of the organism rather than the individual organs’ (Lawrence and Weisz 1998: 2). If organs were diseased then this could only be understood in terms of their interconnections to the body as a whole. Indeed this went beyond the biological processes and often attempted to include the emotions and the psyche into an analysis of disease: ‘the whole person is regarded as being uniquely constituted by individual experiences of health and illness’ (Lawrence and Weisz 1998: 3). Heliotherapy offered precisely this form of approach – it was not based on surgical or pharmacological principles like biomedical approaches. Instead it was based on a ‘naturalistic’ exposure of the body to sunshine. And this, as called for by advocates like Rollier, Cawadias and others, must be based on an individual approach – a ‘meticulous and strict individualization’ (Rollier 1927) of therapy. A further variant of the holistic approach then concentrates on the individual in an external environment. If versions of the biomedical approach could see no further than the organs of the individual then a holistic approach would look to the individual situated in an environment. The sickness of the person could not be dissociated from their environment. This was certainly the case with many nineteenth-century accounts of disease such as miasma theories (see Ackerknecht 1948). The advocates of heliotherapy and actinotherapy appeared to adopt such a holistic approach. Firstly, illnesses that might be cured by sunlight were often seen as having their causation in the degenerative environment of the city that was produced as a binary opposite of a healing nature. Secondly, the cure for these illnesses involved removal to a new environment where the subject could be exposed to the natural rays of the sun. This then articulated well with the concept of vis medicatrix naturae, or ‘the healing power of nature’, which was itself an anti-reductionist perspective in opposition to the biomedical laboratory based approaches. For the helio-advocates the healing power of nature

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was a central theme of their approach to therapy and was frequently stressed as a benefit of heliotherapy over allopathic medicine. Neo-Hippocratism is a label given to those people within the social world of medicine, who became interested in reappraising the role of Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine in the years immediately after the First World War. A renewed interest in the Hippocratic tradition was connected with a number of issues about and around medical developments in the interwar years. For those whose practice was styled on patrician values, the adoption of neo-Hippocratism ‘provided the model personality’ for their paradigm of medicine. The constant references among the helio-advocates to the ancients, and the influence of archaic texts concerning aspects of physical medicine, were part of this tradition. As we saw above the referencing back to the ancients signified a chain of possible equivalences to tie heliotherapy into the modern world of the patrician physician. The establishment of a link between the ‘ancient world of supposed organic unity’ (Cantor 2002: 283), where the ideals of the self-regulating and integrated body had first emerged, sat well with the patrician style of a diagnostics that focused on the individual patient. One of the key figures in the neo-Hippocratic movement was Alexander Cawadias, who, as we saw, advocated the use of heliotherapy and actinotherapy in terms that contrasted this ‘natural’ sunlight approach with what was claimed to be the ‘modern decadence’ of medicine that with its statistical comparisons failed to deal with the whole individual.

CHAPTER 6

Heliosis: Part 1 – Leagues of Sunshine

So the use of sunlight therapies and practices, both natural and artificial, expanded during the first part of the twentieth century, and this growth was interwoven with contemporary social developments such as the rising social hygiene campaign and the movement within sections of medicine towards ‘holism’. It should be stressed that this was not a simple case of one determining the other – of social figurations producing new technical practices, or vice versa. Rather this was an instance of an articulation between human and non-human sociotechnical entities that in turn allowed the emergence of a nexus made up of sunlight, bodies and social worlds – in short, the making of a heliosis. Pickering explores the articulation, of the human and non-human, using a performative idiom: ‘the world is continually doing things and so are we ... the engineering of the material and the human do not proceed independently of one another: in scientific culture, particular configurations of material and human agency appear as interactively stabilized against one another’ (Pickering 1999: 144). Thus Pickering sees a strong connection between ‘material agency’ and human agency – all sociotechnical practices are knotted couplings of the human and the material, the real-time intertwining processes of ‘interactive stabilization’. Hence, to give one example from actinotherapy, the doctor-child-‘sun lamp’ triad is an attempt to stabilize a disease (rickets), a novel treatment and also a particular medical paradigm; but it was also stabilizing a particular moral order in which mothers could not care for their children, and in which poverty and poor diet were unrelated to poor health. But just as a specific form of holistic social hygiene was being stabilized, so too were new bodies being produced – the pallor of the rachitic body was translated into the brown body of a robust, healthy and ruddy child. Just as the use of sunlight in treatment became more commonplace, so too did its use outside of a therapeutic environment. We have already seen how sunlight was being framed in medical practice as an entity that might be of value in raising the general resistance of the body to disease – it was becoming a ‘hygienic’ factor for the promotion of good health – a tonic that might be of benefit to all and not just those suffering from rickets or tuberculosis. A number of factors were steadily weaving the sun’s rays into the constitution of a body that would become strengthened and invigorated. Sunlight was producing new

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bodies that could organically resist the degenerative effects of modern urban life.

HELIO-HYGIENE: CALEB SALEEBY, THE SUNLIGHT LEAGUE AND SMOKE ABATEMENT In the interwar years several different forces came into play to further weave sunlight into the fabric of different social worlds. In the last chapter we saw how the People’s League and the New Health Society played an active role in campaigning around the benefits of sunlight for public health. However their primary role was not the promotion of sunlight itself. These social movements sort to frame the health benefits of sunlight exposure, as one factor among many, such as diet or the reproductive control of the ‘enfeebled’, that might be able to stabilise a new ‘healthy’ social figuration. In this way the population would, via the application of social hygiene, become fit and strong. This was an interactive process in which sunlight needed stabilizing as much as the population. This was because both the sun’s rays and the population were unaccommodating allies: the sun’s rays might be obscured by weather or by smoke pollution; there was a seasonal variation in the power of sunlight; houses and dwellings, especially in poor areas, did not admit sunshine easily; and the populace were resistant to removing their clothing to expose their bodies. However, in the early 1920s, an organization appeared that sought to actively promote the action of the sun’s rays as a benefit in their own right, and to materially ‘domesticate’ the sun’s rays – the Sunlight League, founded in 1924. The story of the League is intimately connected to the career of its founder Caleb Saleeby, a qualified medical doctor. He had graduated from Edinburgh University in 1901 but soon gave up his clinical career and instead focused on his work for private voluntary organizations, freelance journalism and other writing. In the first decades of the twentieth century, especially the 1920s, he regularly wrote a column for the New Statesman under the pseudonym of ‘Lens’. However, before this in 1901, a clinical encounter as a student resident physician in the newly established Royal Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh, was to become a formative experience. Here he attended the first patient to be admitted to the new hospital,1 a woman in labour who was also suffering from rickets. He wrote, with obvious anger, of the incident on a number of occasions in subsequent years: The first occupant of that bed, a little rickety woman from the sun starved smoky Leeds, as brave as a lioness, reached us too late and died after a caesarean section and her infant in my arms a few hours later. It was a tragic beginning for one of the best ideas in the long history of hospitals. (Lens 1928)

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The episode left a lasting impression on Saleeby and informed his later interests in both sunlight and eugenics. In his early career he sought to popularize eugenic philosophies but soon fundamental disagreements emerged with the officers of the Eugenics Education Society over his attacks on ‘the “better dead” school of eugenics, whom he accused of discrediting the movement with their reactionary class prejudices’ (Searle 2004). Indeed he argued that many of the ideas about ‘natural selection’ favoured by the wider eugenic movement were mistaken. For example, he addressed the falling rates of infant mortality and how, from a simple eugenic position, this should lead to increased rates of degeneracy, but that this outcome was unsupported by empirical evidence: The natural elimination of the unfit has been, it would appear, in a very large degree and very suddenly suspended ... Further, very striking and deplorable consequences should be evident at Bournvill and Letchworth [in New Zealand] ... where infant mortality is now down around forty per thousand ... under these conditions natural selection has no chance; nearly every baby lives; what a pitiful crowd of degenerates the adult population must be! But we all remember the Apollo-Hercules type whom New Zealand sent us in the war – the Scot in excelsis ... perfect and all-significant contrasts to the typical product of the conditions in Glasgow and Dundee twenty years ago, when ‘natural selection’ really had a chance. (Lens 1924) The implication of his arguments was that the enemies of a healthy population were poverty and pollution. Saleeby had other notable differences to the wider eugenic movement such as his continuing interest in promoting post-natal care and the gradual modification of his views away from the need for ‘racial improvements’ towards advocating policies to arrest, what he believed to be the quantitative and qualitative decline of existing populations. He thought that these issues were best dealt with by preventative medicine and education to combat what he called the ‘racial poisons’, a term he claimed to have invented,2 of venereal disease, pollution, tobacco and alcohol. Saleeby was then an active part of the social hygiene movement and, as such, was a campaigning member of both Arbuthnot Lane’s New Health Society and the People’s League of Health.3 Despite his long association with the eugenic movement he was what may be described as a ‘reformist’ rather than a ‘conservative’ eugenicist. In the post-war years Saleeby began his advocacy of increased sunlight exposure as a strategy to be deployed in the project to strengthen the health of the general population. From the beginning he linked his support of sunlight to his hatred of smoke pollution within the city. For Saleeby, city smoke pollution was an enemy of good hygiene for two reasons: first, as a bronchial irritant, it was a threat to health in its own right; and second, smoke in the atmosphere blocked the sun’s rays, especially ultraviolet rays, and thus prevented their ‘health enhancing’ effects from reaching the population below. The principal cause of

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smoke was the domestic use of coal to heat dwellings. Despite alternatives to the use of raw coal being available in this period (e.g. gas, electricity or smokeless coal) houses continued to be built with the use of coal as the only available source of heat, and this led Saleeby to conclude that these were ‘designed to perpetuate the darkness, dirt, disease and death which shamefully distinguish our present cities’. Thus he argued that smoke led to what he termed the ‘diseases of darkness’, which included rickets and tuberculosis but also a range of other amorphous conditions: ‘the darkness that can be smelt in cities promotes suicide, melancholia, drunkenness, depression of the mind as well as body’ (Lens 1920). In 1921 Saleeby visited Rollier’s clinic at Leysin, Switzerland and subsequently wrote a series of articles in the New Statesman under the title of ‘Modern Sun Worship’ (Lens 1921a; Lens 1921b; Lens 1921c). His book, Sunlight and Health, appeared in 1923 and was reprinted throughout the 1920s in five later editions. In these he used similar language to Gauvain (see Chapter 5) when describing Rollier’s authoritative place in modern medical practice. He was the ‘High Priest of Modern-Sun Worship ... and his temple is Leysin, in Switzerland’ (Lens 1921c). However, for Saleeby the significance of exposure to the sun involved in heliotherapy went far beyond clinical practice and the fight against tuberculosis: ‘The therapeutic lessons of Leysin are of supreme importance, not at all in themselves, but because of the prophylactic lessons they teach, for our cities, homes, schools, workshops or mines, wherever they may be’ (Lens 1921c). Saleeby came to refer to the combination of smoke abatement policies together with prophylactic application of the sun’s rays as ‘helio-hygiene’ – a concept that it was hoped would capture the idea of the health of urban populations being strengthened by exposure to sunlight under clear pollution-free skies. The promotion of helio-hygiene very much underpinned the formation of the Sunlight League in 1924, with Saleeby as the Chairman and Queen Alexandra as the Patron. One of the League’s main activities was the regular publication of the journal Sunlight: A Journal of Light and Truth. The first edition of the journal carried messages of support for the newly formed League from a number of eminent sources in politics, the sciences and the arts; among others these included: David Lloyd George, former Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party – ‘the present generation has no more important and more hopeful task than to let sunlight into our towns’; Charles John Bond, Chairman of the MRC Tuberculosis Committee and keen eugenicist – ‘the true aim of the League is to spread knowledge ... of the preventive influence of sunshine and fresh air in raising the resistance of the body to all forms of microbe infection’; the novelist H. Rider Haggard – ‘the man who abolishes smoke in our great cities and lets more sunshine into their crowed streets will be one of the greatest benefactors of his age’; William Arbuthnot Lane, the founder of the New Health Society – ‘I am greatly interested in your Sunshine league’; the actor and theatre manager, Johnston Forbes-Robertson; and the Director of the Royal Institution, W.H. Bragg.

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The editorial foreword to the first edition warned that we were entering a second Industrial Revolution. Whereas the first Industrial Revolution had been characterized by coal and steam, the second would be based on the new form of power – electricity – and on better forms of communication. This would present a chance for ‘laying the foundation of a social system that shall satisfy all the aspirations of a great, intelligent and educated people’ (Sunlight 1924). The editorial was thus couched in a discourse of scientific progress leading to a new social arrangement. There were also mystical undertones discussing recent insights from physics:‘every individual is united with the totality of living beings by invisible bonds. All the living hold together, and all yield to a single impulsion’ (Sunlight 1924). But the main emphasis was on forging new types of city life, where admission of sunlight was weaved into a utopian view of progress: We declare war against the powers of darkness; smoke and slums must go ... our new houses must be placed so as to receive the sun ... We seek to multiply the sources of information and education to such an extent that ... no man or woman shall be stricken with disease for lack of knowledge of the light that heals ... it is ours to better the environment, and bring forth a fitter race for humanity’s high purposes. (Sunlight 1924: 5–6) The Sunlight League campaigned, both directly and via its journal, for a variety of causes such as mixed sunbathing, open-air sunlight schools and the general health benefits of sunlight. But foremost amongst these was the cause of smoke abatement which was a constant theme even within general articles. Thus in a paper on helio-hygiene a comparison is drawn between the water-borne diseases of the nineteenth-century city and the need for pure air and light in the twentieth century. Additionally the use of coal as a heating fuel is here framed as a shameful waste of a national resource: ‘if some barbarians ... should burn the contents of the Bodleian Library, which are certainly combustible, we should reproach them for seeing nothing but fuel in such a priceless thesaurus’ (Saleeby 1928). During the 1920s the League directly lobbied the then Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain, on the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Bill being laid before Parliament. A series of letters were reproduced in Sunlight and The Times documenting the exchange and laying out the League’s position that exemptions contained in the proposed bill should be removed, especially those relating to coal fires in private dwellings. Chamberlain’s reply stressed his own desire ‘to do all that is reasonably possible to reduce the smoke evil’, but it also highlighted the danger of measures that might ‘hinder recovery of trade’ during a period of industrial depression (Sunlight 1926; The Times 1926a). Of course the League was not alone in its campaign to limit the amount of smoke pollution in cities. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century commentators had remarked on the poor quality of air in British cities.4 The desire for clean air condensed several anxieties around public health and illness, but it also

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refered to more general rising concerns within the nineteenth century about public civility, visibility and the socio-sensual environment. As Enzensberger has suggested, the emerging industrial bourgeoisie were becoming increasingly concerned about the place of dirt and filth with modern social worlds. These concerns frequently focused on surfaces and boundaries: Every upheaval of an existing social order, including our present industrialtechnological revolution, inevitably generates immense quantities of dirt. Definitions become blurred, and everything threatens to migrate permanently to peripheral areas and turn into dirt. As a result, people proceed with extreme caution, paying equally strict attention to external and internal cleanliness. With the advent of Puritanism, the skin’s susceptibility to dirt must have become universal; from this point on, that is, the skin avoided every type of contact. Hygiene entered the scene as a form of piety (with the maxim,“cleanliness is next to godliness”). (Enzensberger 1972: 88) Smoke pollution was ubiquitous – it imperils all hygienic surfaces and passes across all boundaries.5 As Otter points out, smoke endangered the very basis of bourgeois liberal governmentality by undermining the visibility of civil conduct. The modern city was fashioned so that the ‘respectable mastered their passions in public spaces conducive to the exercise of clear, controlled perception: wide streets, squares, and parks’ (Otter 2002). The pollution of smoke threatened to return the city to an anti-bourgeois darkness in which conduct and behaviour could not be observed. Visual hygiene and the availability of clean air for the unhindered passage of sunlight were thus inseparable from the wider desires of the social hygiene movement. Sunlight not only brought strength to bodies and eradicated microbes – it also revealed the open spaces of the city to the gaze of its controlling authorities: ‘the moral, physical and biological fears they aroused [the slums] were inseparable from the spaces in which they lived. Liberal society, in short, needed to be built and maintained – wide streets, slum demolition, sewage and street lighting were all attempts to assemble spaces where ruling freedom could be made possible and visible’ (Otter 2002: 3). Be this as it may, the eventual passing of the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act (1926) was a disappointment for the League and was described in Sunlight as a ‘miserable triumph’. The Act made no allowance for the control of smoke from domestic dwellings or for the empowerment of local authorities to effectively control either domestic or industrial smoke. Saleeby described it as a ‘reactionary Act’ and Mr Chamberlain as having ‘shown how little he had been acquainted with the facts ... meanwhile, my advice to the unborn is Hurry Not’ (Saleeby 1927). It appeared that smoke was far more resistant to removal from the modern city than other forms of dirt. This was undoubtedly partially due to the materialities which underpinned the smoke problem – every home having at least one fireplace as its main source of winter warmth and coal still being a major form of industrial

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power. But as Otter observed, the case of ‘smoke abatement suggests, something more than brute material resistance’ (Otter 2002: 14). The filthy city had itself been made into a bourgeois virtue with ‘good business’ and smoke often being entwined. The idea of progress could be equally tied to ‘smoke and dirt’ as it could to ‘sunlight and clean air’.

THE SUNLIGHT LEAGUE, STRONG MOTHERS AND BEAUTIFUL MEN While the struggle over smoke abatement was a major preoccupation for the Sunlight League a number of other issues were also pursued. The League campaigned for local authorities to allow mixed-gender sunbathing and for a relaxation of the rules about appropriate attire for bathing. However there were also different associations of sunlight for men and women produced within the League’s activities – sunlight was being gendered in particular ways. One articulation was around the discourse of sunlight and motherhood, and this strongly resonated with wider debates at the beginning of the twentieth century about ‘natural’ childbirth. The origins of the ‘natural birth’ movement have been traced by Moscucci to the social hygiene and holistic movements in the first decades of the twentieth century (Moscucci 2003). Social hygiene reformers became increasingly concerned about the differential birth rate with poorer families appearing to have larger and less healthy families – for many social hygienists it seemed that the ‘least fit’ were reproducing at the fastest rates. Various theories were put forward to account for this but ‘fear of childbirth was also frequently mentioned as one of the reasons why middle class women were shirking their reproductive duties’ (Moscucci 2003: 169). One solution to this was to draw on holistic philosophies which argued that the increasing ‘pathologization’ of childbirth within mainstream medicine was partly responsible for the fear of childbirth and the resulting decline in middle-class birth rates. The ‘cultured’ and difficult birth of modern medicine was unfavourably compared to the easy and painless ‘primitive’ birth being observed by anthropologists and missionaries. Campaigners for natural childbirth stressed the sacred calling of motherhood and the need for trust and cooperation between a pregnant woman and her attendants. One underlying implication of the natural childbirth movement being that women should ‘drop their claims to emancipation and return to their “natural” role as child rearers and homemakers’ (Moscucci 2003: 171). A leading advocate of ‘natural’ childbirth was Dr Kathleen Vaughan, who had a close association with the Sunlight League and published several articles in Sunlight. Vaughan did pioneering work in the provision of medical care to Indian women and children living in rural areas. While working in India she noticed marked health differences between affluent women in Kashmir

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cities, enclosed by the Purdah system, and the poorer rural boatwomen who lived active lives in the open air. Many of the women subjected to the Purdah suffered from osteomalacia, a similar disease to rickets leading to bone deformity and softening. Many of these women had severe difficulties during childbirth with a resulting high rate of infant mortality. On the other hand, the boatwomen appeared to have relatively trouble-free pregnancies and deliveries, and appeared to need little medical care. As Vaughan wrote in Sunlight: ‘None of these people [the boatwomen] ever came to hospital for confinement, because it was so easy, and the Mission Hospital, which has been in Kashmir for forty of fifty years, reports the same thing – no boatwoman applies for help in confinement’ (Vaughan 1930). Vaughan then reasoned that these different experiences of childbirth were due to environmental factors, with exposure to sunlight and exercise being the main differences between these women. This had obvious resonances with the theories of Paton, Findlay and Hill about the causes of rickets and the desire to blame the unnatural and degenerate effects of city living as a cause of disease. Vaughan then sought to apply this reasoning to women living in modern Western cities. Through ‘unnatural’ practices women’s bodies had become unfit for childbearing. Vaughan thought that to some extent this state could be addressed by adopting the squatting position for childbirth,6 a practice she had seen in Kashmir and which she introduced to Britain. But she was also an advocate of mothers exposing themselves to sunlight and open air as an aid to good maternal health: The women who live in seclusion suffer: the clerks who work all day in Government offices behind glass windows, suffer; the English women and children who remain indoors with closed windows during the hot weather, suffer ... The ancient Britons seem to have been strong and healthy enough in the same climate, but they were open-air people, not afraid of light and wind, whereas we moderns tend more and more to fear light and air which is so necessary for us. (Vaughan 1928) Thus we can see that Vaughan was equating and comparing the ‘artificial’ living conditions of the modern city dweller with the organic naturalness of the ‘premoderns’ living in either ancient Britain or modern India. Women, and especially mothers, needed to learn lessons from their primitive sisters, to use exercise and to expose their bodies to sunlight. It was these measures that would ensure the safety of their babies. That an organization, with its roots in the social hygiene movement, should focus on women’s reproductive capacities should not be a surprise. What was more unexpected was the Sunlight League’s attentions to the bodies of men and their relation to sunlight. Here the focus was on men’s apparel and thus one of the more unusual branches of the Sunlight League and the New Health Society was the formation of the Men’s Dress Reform Party (MDRP) in 1929, the formation of which was announced in Sunlight and The

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Times. A list of those people supporting the party’s initial manifesto included: the Dean of St Paul’s, W.R. Inge;7 the eccentric artist, Richard Sickert;8 the actor Ernest Thesiger; the headmaster of University College School, Guy Kendal; and Caleb Saleeby. The society was founded by Alfred Jordan, an internationally renowned radiologist, who was know for wearing shorts in his professional life, something that in this period was sufficiently unusual to generate press interest. Jordan was a co-founder of the New Health Society,9 and became the Honorary Secretary of the MDRP. The origins of the MDRP partly derived from discussions among the Clothing Sub-Committee of the New Health Society, and partly from the principles of increased bodily exposure suggested by the hygienic theories of the Sunlight League. The manifesto was reproduced in Sunlight and The Times on 17 June 1929. This stressed that the MDRP was open to all classes of men, from the ‘working chap to the peer’s son’, and that it was not a ‘crank or a faddist’ organization. The actual demands of the new party were somewhat diffuse, but included: ‘Most members wish for shorts; a few for the kilt; nearly all hate trousers. Some plead for less heavy materials and less padding; others for brighter colours; but the villain of the piece is the collar-stud. A wail has gone up throughout the land; man is clutching at his throat and crying’ (Jordan 1929b). The main matters of concern for the party were then that men’s clothes were too tight, cumbersome and ugly. Another identified problem was that traditional men’s clothes at this time were largely unwashable:‘we wear dark clothes which, as we nicely calculate, need not (as indeed they cannot) be washed, for they won’t show the dirt’ (Jordan 1929a: 31). Throughout the next few years the MDRP organized a number of events, such as Men’s Dress Reform Day, which was to be free of processions and ceremonies but was to be ‘merely the wearing of hygienic dress in town (and everywhere else) the whole day by all who will’ (Jordan 1929a: 30). Employers were urged to allow their employees to wear reform dress for the day; and a series of rallies were organized during which prizes were to be awarded for the most imaginative reform dress worn by a man. Indeed the summer rallies of the MDRP became regular events during the 1930s and the event of 1931, staged at the Suffolk Street Galleries, was attended by about a thousand people, including H.G. Wells. The movement generated considerable press interest and its activities were regularly covered in The Times, the Evening Standard, the Daily Sketch and the Morning Post. Most of the time this coverage was supportive but the humorous magazine Punch ridiculed the movement from the beginning. The first rally of the MDRP attracted around 150 people, the majority of whom ‘wore short trousers, tennis shirts, woollen stockings, and ordinary lounge jackets. Two women were in cream-coloured trousers, with sandals, and a man wore a garment which was a cross between a skirt and a kilt’ (The Times 1929). Correspondence on The Times letters page questioned whether the aims of the party went far enough by confining their desires for change to comfort and health: ‘the desire of men

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for beauty is just as strong as the desire for comfort; and, if this artistic desire be ignored, the new party will be sacrificing half of its possible supporters’ (Burdett 1929). Activities of the MDRP continued throughout the 1930s but the party became subject to an increasing degree of popular ridicule. One of the final events of the MDRP was the Coronation dress reform competition staged at Alexandra Palace in 1937 and covered not only in the press but also on radio and television. Despite the novelty of being televised, BBC publications lampooned the men attending the event:‘Whether man’s lower limbs look their best encased in slightly flattened parallel tubes may be open to doubt, but at least there seems no great aesthetic advantage in cutting the tubes short at the knee ... [but the show] provided viewers with an entertaining ten minutes and plenty of laughter’ (the Listener quoted in Burman 1995). Thus the MDRP failed in its attempts to ‘inoculate itself against ridicule’ (see Michael 1997) and the dress reform movement became increasingly irrelevant. There were a variety of reasons for this. Burman argues that the MDRP, despite its calls for dress reform, and its commitment to a version of modernity, failed to appreciate what was already happening to men’s fashions in the 1930s: ‘men were increasingly enjoying the pleasures of modernity and consumerism through the medium of fashion’ (Burman 1995: 282). The conventional, and increasingly massed-produced clothing trade, was able to offer new garments made from lighter, washable fabrics and these were couched in an advertising language that fused quasi-scientific rhetoric with the terminology of fashion and aesthetics. The ‘liberationist’ reform terminology of hygiene used by the MDRP appeared outlandish in comparison. In addition many of the designs of the MDRP seemed amateurish, fussy and flamboyant using techniques and styles that resonated with feminine styles of dressmaking. In contrast significant sections of the clothing trade were producing styles that were an ‘embodiment of conventional masculinity’ while also adopting modernist styles of streamlining and athleticism. The example of the MDRP reveals something of the ways in which gender was performed within the constellation of societies around the social hygiene movement. The natural birth movement and dress reform could be seen as reactions to a fear of women’s emancipation and while there may have been elements of this there were also other factors in play. These movements were attempts at enacting a form of modernity that was simultaneously pre-modern – that sought to establish a more ‘natural’ existence in the present that was still in tune with the ancients or even the ‘primitives’. The home-made designs of the reformers could be seen as referencing a style of clothing that was from a time when men’s clothing was more flamboyant, feminine and unstructured. But while the MDRP often appeared to adopt a feminine style of clothing, with their unstructured clothes made of soft fabric, the underlying project was the attempt to tie versions of masculinity more firmly into the ideals of social hygiene, just as the natural birth movement had sought to do with women and motherhood. Thus

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articles appeared in the journal of the New Health Society which argued the case for a dress reform that would produce a male beauty that celebrated masculine grace and physique. This would then articulate with the ideal of motherhood established through ‘natural birth’. If men could produce themselves through hygienic clothing as more beautiful then they would inevitably be more attractive to the potential mothers – beautiful men and strong mothers reaching a hygienic perfection under the sun’s rays: Yet, underlying all their so-called modernity, to be devoted to worthy men remains their deepest instinctive need. In the long run, therefore, a renaissance of beauty for men – true masculine beauty of the body and mind, the bloom of a joyful spirit – might mean happier marriages, well-born and beautiful children, a healthier and more beautiful race. (Dion Byngham 1932, quoted in Burman 1995)

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CHAPTER 7

Heliosis: Part 2 – Building Worlds of Sunlight

We have considered how sunlight was becoming established as a positive entity – as a sociotechnical element of the social hygienic regime. A recurring theme in this has been how the city was produced as a seat of depravity, ill-health and pollution, a theme that has been associated with a wide variety of movements and intellectual traditions. Thus both the Scouting and leisure camping movements drew on ideals of pastoralism – the ‘image of lost rural bliss and to an affinity with Nature’ (Ward and Hardy 1984: 9) – and then set these against the malevolent influence of city life. Indeed the reaction against the perceived distortion caused by modern industrial urban life was widespread in the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, and gained an expression in the works of writers and commentators such as William Morris (Morris 1962; Morris 1974) and Edward Carpenter (Carpenter 1887). Similarly many theories of disease aetiology implicated the environment of the industrialized urban centres. Thus one of the assumptions underpinning the sanatoria movement was that tuberculosis was exacerbated by city life and removal to the restful influence of ‘nature’ may aid a cure. Theories about the causes of rickets similarly sought an explanation in the conditions of confinement in city habitats. Additionally the social hygiene movement, especially as represented by organizations like the New Health Society, the People’s League of Health and the Sunlight League regarded the city, as constituted at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, as fundamentally unhealthy places for mass residence. Of course, these negative ideas about the city fit with a long tradition of regarding the quality of people’s lived experiences as based on aspects of the materialities of place and environment. The recurring cultural theme of place meaning has been fully explored by Raymond Williams (Williams 1973), in his study of the country and the city. In this he traces the rural/urban dichotomy that, since early industrialization, has divided localities between ideals of peace, innocence and virtue versus worldliness, noise and ambition. The rural has been associated with a unity between humans and nature and as the true site of meaningful community. This tradition has, as we have seen, also penetrated the sociotechnical boundary between the body and the sun. However nowhere has this been more apparent, particularly in its more utopian guises, than with attempts to plan the built landscape. Hence by the end of the nineteenth century

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a variety of commentators and writers were expressing a pastoralist discourse that saw the city as representing a fall from a past rural bliss and the chance of any affinity with nature. Be that as it may, many differing solutions, incorporating versions of the rural, were offered to the problem of industrial urban growth: the scouting and sanatoria movements sought to provide a temporary rural sojourn that would boost health and morals; the New Health Society wished to permanently resettle the masses on the land where the fit would prosper; the Sunlight League wanted to purify the air of the cities, promote the use parks and open spaces; and even the actinotherapists sought to artificially reify nature in the city via their sunlamps, which could produce the sun’s rays on demand. However there were also moves at the beginning of the twentieth century to alter the very fabric of human habitats, with the role of sunlight playing a significant part.

THE GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT AND THE ‘SUNSHINE ARCHITECTS’ While many of the diverse movements we have considered in previous chapters blamed city life for the perceived ills of modernity, the rapid growth of urban centres during industrialization was certainly a well-documented problem of almost inconceivable scale. For example between 1801 and 1851 London’s population more than doubled, rising from 960,000 to around 2 million. While some of this may have been due to the increasing birth rates amongst city dwellers the migration from rural to urban was also playing a significant role (Lawton 1986). A similar pattern of urban growth could be found around many of Britain’s industrialized areas. Many of the developments to house the new urban populations were little more than the barest attempts to provide shelter, with small, cramped, back-to-back houses situated in small courtyard developments into which daylight rarely suffused. Many such housing developments lacked either sewers or were surrounded by paving stones with the result that access to these dwellings was through muddy courtyards and lanes filled with stagnant, unsanitary and foul-smelling water. The public revelation, in contemporary accounts of this era, of the conditions endured by the urban poor caused widespread public scandal. One of the common motifs used in these analyses was the absence of light in the ‘slums’ and urban environments. Indeed the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, produced a famous exposure of the conditions under which the urban poor lived and the very title of this work, In Darkest England (1890) established a link between the darkness and ill health. Similarly James Hole’s The Homes of the Working Classes (1866) described the oppressive environmental conditions created by nineteenth-century urbanization when he warns of the ‘danger signal showing that we are infringing the laws of health in trying to live where the air will not support plants’ (quoted in Creese 1966: 62).

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Publications such as these made a significant impact and provided a momentum for liberal reformers to tackle the problem of the city. One of the first attempts was the Public Health Act of 1875, which had an immediate material effect on the socio-spatial organization of British cities and without question rendered a new drawing of the industrial city’s social imaginary. The 1875 Act cleared away ‘hidden slum courts’ and brought into being the so-called ‘byelaw’ streets. These were streets where all the dwellings were required to have an exposed ‘street front’. It was this piece of legislation that established the typical ‘terraced housing’ aesthetic associated with many British industrial cities. The ‘bye-law street’ was a significant sociotechnical innovation because, by establishing regularity and order in housing patterns, it became far easier to provide services such as drainage and sewers, but to regulate the urban poor as well. These new wide streets also admitted sunlight into the homes of the urban working population for the first time. However the multiple rows of ‘byelaw’ streets did little to encourage any development of the idea of community as beloved of those advocating elements of the rural as a solution to the problems of the city. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a group of radical campaigners began to emerge who sought to design better environments for the urban masses. In so doing they were also able to offer a positive utopian alternative to the perceived deprivations of the industrial cities. What is more, sunlight played a central role in the sociotechnical development of these new forms of urban architecture and design. Of course, throughout the nineteenth century there had been experiments in the building of communities for workers, often under the influence of philanthropic industrialists who wished to provide respectable housing for their workforces. Typical of these was the influential Port Sunlight, on the Wirral, which was established in the 1890s under the direction of William Hesketh Lever, the founder of Lever Brothers (later to become Unilever). Lever was himself an advocate of sunlight and fresh air and slept outside every night on an iron bed placed on a special balcony. His greatest innovation was the manufacture and marketing of a new soap based on vegetable oils, at a time when soap was normally sold by weight as a loose grocery. Lever gave his new soap a brand name and individually covered each pre-cut bar in a distinctive wrapper bearing the name ‘Sunlight’. The brand name referred to Lever’s own love of sunlight and the open air, but also made reference to the supposed ‘hygienic’ powers of the sun’s rays. Such was the success of this new product and its innovative marketing that a new factory was required to meet demand and this was established at what is now Port Sunlight. Lever, in the tradition of other philanthropic industrialists, probably through a mixture of altruism, showmanship and business efficiency, wished to provide workers with decent accommodation close to his new factory. But he also wished to recreate a community along the lines of his own version of a traditional English village – this was to be a strong fusion of social function with visual appeal. However

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Port Sunlight was, as Bayley points out, ‘parasitic of an existing, conventional town or city and not an independent entity’ (Bayley 1975: 5). The attempt to build new organic urban communities in the twentieth century, which were independent of existing towns or cities, was the result of the pioneering plans of Ebenezer Howard – the foremost advocate of the garden city movement. Howard was not an architect or town planner by profession, but an inventor.1 Even though Howard may be credited with having ‘invented’ the garden city, its genealogy was somewhat eclectic. This is because Howard did not follow any specific intellectual tradition. Rather, two influences have been suggested (see Creese 1966; Osborn 1965) as informing the original idea of the garden city: the utopian socialist science fiction of Edward Bellamy;2 and the social reformism of the Nonconformist Church tradition, especially the questions of land reform and the nationalization of industry. As Osborn points out: ‘Bellamy’s two basic assumptions – that technological advance could emancipate men from degrading toil, and that men are inherently co-operative and equalitarian – were the essence of Howard’s own optimistic outlook, in which there was no proletarian resentment or class-bitterness, and not a trace of nostalgic antiurbanism, anti-industrialism, or back-to-the-landism’ (Osborn 1965: 20). Thus the solution Howard proposed to the problem of urbanism, and expressed in his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902) was to invent a new form of community – one that was neither country nor city. The best of the rural and the urban was to be combined into new hybrid ‘garden cities’. Hence cities had the advantages of high employment and stimulation for their inhabitants, but they had the disadvantages of pollution and high costs of living. Alternately the country had the assets of the ‘pastoral beauty of nature’ and clean air, but little employment for those who lived there. If the advantages of the city and the country could be combined in one community this would then form a ‘magnet’ to draw people away from the corrupting cities and the impoverished country: All the advantages of the most energetic and active town life with all the beauty and delight of the country ... they may be secured in perfect combination: and the certainty of being able to live this life will be the magnet which will produce the effect for which we are all striving. (Howard 1965: 45) The garden cities were to be decentralized urban clusters encircling existing cities and separated by green belts. The model for these urban clusters was to be the English village in which self-contained cottages, each with their own garden, would be served by local services, small industries and local employers. The importance of direct sunlight was seen as one of the guiding principles of these utopian town plans. Thus an advertisement for one of the first garden cities depicted three images with an explanatory caption under each: a smoky city with ‘living and working in the smoke’; a suburb with ‘living in the suburbs and

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working in the smoke’; and finally a garden city with ‘living and working in the sun’. Howard, in Garden Cities, describes his project ‘a golden opportunity’: afforded by the fact that the land to be settled upon has but few buildings or works upon it, shall be availed of in the fullest manner, by so laying out a Garden City that, as it grows, the free gifts of Nature – fresh air, sunlight, breathing room and playing room – shall be still retained in all needed abundance, and by so employing the resources of modern science that Art may supplement Nature, and life become an abiding joy and delight. (Howard 1965: 127) Howard set up the Garden Cities Association in 1899 to manage the co-operative ownership of these new towns and, despite negative reviews in The Times and the Fabian News, work began on the first garden city, Letchworth, in 1904. The principal architects to work on Letchworth Garden City were two teetotal socialists, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, who had set up a business together as architects and planners. They worked in a tradition that was heavily influenced by the cottage style of the arts and crafts movements. Indeed, Unwin was an associate of Edward Carpenter, had attended lectures in Oxford by Ruskin, and contributed to William Morris’s socialist journal, Commonweal. Both were established architects who in their previous commissions had developed a unique style which was ‘a sequential mixture of evolutionary historicism and the resort to the eternal and “classic” verities of purism’ (Creese 1963: 161). Parker and Unwin had a strong commitment to the role of natural illumination in designing interior spaces and have been credited with beginning the ‘sunshine philosophy’ in British housing. Hence a central characteristic of all their designs were their attempts to open the interiors of houses to allow greater incursion of natural light. This was not just for functional reasons but because sunlight would promote good mental and physical health and therefore also domestic happiness. For them sunlight held ‘the typical turn-of-the-century fascination of a primitive element and a civilized commodity in short supply’ (Creese 1963: 163). Parker and Unwin also published and lectured widely about their design philosophy. They promoted both the importance of ‘sunlight’ being designed into living spaces and that the art of house design should allow the structure to be a pleasure not only for its occupants but also for those outside the dwelling.3 In addition, housing should always allow the occupants to enjoy the beauty of the local environment without it standing ‘out as a disturbing excrescence’.4 In short, any design for a house must reflect and be ‘suggestive more of man’s dependence upon Nature, less of his defiance of her powers’ (Parker and Unwin 1901b: 110). This could be achieved by always using local materials and local techniques but also by considering carefully the actual orientation of each house. Here they stated the importance of ensuring an adequate inlet of sunlight:

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Rise and Shine It is now pretty generally realised that no sacrifice is too great which is necessary to enable us to bring sunshine into all the main living rooms ... The general rule, then, would seem to be, so to contrive as to get the sunshine into a room at the time when it is most likely to be occupied. Let the study or breakfast room be east or south-east, a general living room or drawing room south or south-west. A good western window in the room we most occupy during the latter part of the day, gives us many an extra hour of daylight; while the opportunity it affords us of habitually seeing the bright colour of sunset is a privilege which is worth some effort to obtain. (Parker and Unwin 1901b: 113)

Parker and Unwin carried these ideas into the design and construction of Letchworth. While Howard may have had the initial idea of the garden city it was Parker and Unwin who carried them into a material form. For the town plan they drew heavily on designs that referred to an idealized village cottage, where function and beauty could be interwoven. However, while appearing to convey an impression of tradition, the cottages also had an underlying puritanism of style,5 with clean plastered walls and simple wooden floor coverings: ‘it is not easy to create a decoration more beautiful than the play of sunlight or firelight on a white-washed wall’ (Parker and Unwin 1901a: 59). The use of sunlight was further stressed in the building regulations issued for Letchworth, which Unwin discussed some years later: That every house should have its garden and should be so placed and planned that all its rooms should be flooded with light and sunshine, unblocked by other houses or by its own projections, were the main ideals. It was necessary to break away from the customary type of street with its endless rows of houses, cramped in frontage, hideous in appearance from the street. (Unwin 1909) Only a small proportion of the envisaged garden cities were built as originally intended (e.g. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City), with the characteristic mode of urban expansion in the twentieth century being for ‘suburb spreading beyond suburb’. Be that as it may, the influence of the ‘sunshine philosophy’ of Parker and Unwin has been immeasurable in the making of the twentieth-century urban landscape, with Unwin being credited with the invention of the British profession and practice of town planning (see Worpole 2000).Yet the high ideals established at Letchworth were often diluted in subsequent years with corrupted semblances of the garden city being repeated in suburbs where the ‘cottagevernacular’ style, with its ‘sunny aspects’, has become the architectural model for suburban development.

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SUNLIGHT ARCHITECTURE FOR HEALTH The use of architecture to bring sunlight directly into the living spaces of people’s homes was formalized in the designs of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, with one of their aims being to improve the hygiene of houses and thus produce the ‘healthy house’. This principle, developed with the garden city movement, was then fused with the traditional pavilion hospital plan (with long corridor wards with windows on each side) to produce a new form of sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis (Forty 1980). For example, Howard approved the plans for the new Papworth Village Settlement, a community sanatoria consisting of a purpose-built village with attached industries to allow patients the opportunity for paid work during treatment. More generally the problem of suitable sanatoria design, to allow easy patient access to the open air and sunlight, had always been an architectural problem. The question of how best to move the infirm and bedridden between the internal space of a ward to the external space of the sun was long debated. One common solution to this had been the typical sanatoria appearance of long wide balconies backed by French windows leading immediately into the wards and rooms of patients. Thus patients could be wheeled directly out of the French windows still in their beds for exposure to sunlight and fresh air. This design was taken a stage further with sanatoria such as the King Edward VII Sanatoria at Midhurst, Sussex. The design was the result of an essay competition, the winners being a physician, Arthur Latham, and an architect, William West. In their design great stress was placed upon open space and airiness: the sanatorium must ‘be so constructed that the atmosphere within rivals the outside air in point of purity’ (Latham and West (1906), quoted in Bryder 1988: 50). The actual building at Midhurst had a step-like façade, ‘which enabled all patients to have a spacious balcony in front of their bedroom, and at the same time did not deprive the room on the floor below of sunshine’ (Tuberculosis Yearbook (1913), quoted in Bryder 1988: 50). This small innovation, of a stepped building, to allow the easy transportation of invalids’ bodies between shade and sunlight, started out as a medical practice to ease the movement of the bedridden, but later in the twentieth century became translated into a sociotechnical facet of leisure and tourism industries. The step-like balconies, rooms and windows originally designed to allow the easy transportation of the infirm became a regular feature of hotel and apartment buildings in sunny tourist regions. The practices and sociotechnical arrangements needed to transport the inactive and weak bodies of the infirm between the environments of shade and sunlight were now translated in order to minimize the effort that the ‘lazy’ tourist must make in order to obtain sunlight exposure. The correspondence between the inactivity of the sanatorium tuberculosis treatment involving heliotherapy, and the practices associated with modern tourism, as we shall see later, went far beyond the simple innovation in building

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design. However, even in 1903, many of the adverts for sanatoria read like modern holiday resort brochures: The ground slopes gently to the south, and is partly clothed with woodland including magnificent pine trees, while the western border consists of open moorland ending in a ravine. The southern portion of the property is beautiful park like ground ... The large tract in front is beautifully sheltered, and has been laid out as terraced gardens, with croquet lawns and flower borders by the well known landscape gardener, Miss Jekyll. (quoted in Bryder 1988: 48) The resonance between innovative building design, sunlight and health found its clearest expression in the design and construction of two health centres set up in the interwar years in London: the Peckham Health Centre and the Finsbury Health Centre. The Peckham Centre was an experimental initiative in the 1930s to provide community based primary health care to a working-class community in south London. However it was also a response to the changing role of medicine (discussed at the end of Chapter 5) and represented an attempt by its founders, Dr Scott Williamson and Dr Innes Pearse, to define a modern role for the general practitioner within state medicine. The centres were not only going to provide comprehensive family health care but were also a swimming pool, a theatre, a nursery, a dance hall, a gymnasium, a cafeteria, a games room, as well as doctors’ consulting rooms. Members of the health centre could relax in the clublike atmosphere while being exposed to a preventative approach to health. The Peckham Health Centre was also designed as an experiment (it was known as the Peckham experiment) into the impact of a positive environment on health, with those attending the centre being observed by Williamson and Pearce, and their team of doctors. The building was itself an integral component of the Peckham experiment. Designed by Owen Williams, a pioneer of the British Modern Movement and the glass curtain wall, the building was constructed of cruciform columns supporting concrete floors. The number of internal walls was kept to a minimum and most of the external walls consisted of uninterrupted stretches of glass. This openness and transparency of the structure allowed sunlight to flood the building. In addition the structure fitted with the original concept of the building as a social experiment because the users of the centre could be easily observed both by the doctors and researchers. But the open structure also allowed the users of the centre to observe each other. As Pearse observed later, such an open structure might have seemed inappropriate for the demands of privacy normally associated with a health centre. However in practice this was not an issue: It may be difficult in the first instance for the reader to conceive of such a building; difficult to rid the mind of a picture of a glass-house with large open spaces in which little comfort and sociability would be likely to forthcome. To

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those of us who use it, it does not appear like this. The main social floor looking on to a blue-green swimming bath, the ripples of water casting their ceaseless reflections on walls and ceilings, has at once an attraction that is unique. On the sunny side the building has gently curved window-bays and everywhere the large open floor spaces are broken up by pillars which, besides giving variations of light and shade, give a number of foci in the aisles about which intimate groups can naturally form without interfering with the continuity of circulation throughout the building. (Pearse and Crocker 1986: 68) While the aims of the Peckham Health Centre were to promote good health and thus prevent illness from appearing, the Finsbury Health Centre was designed to fight existing diseases and epidemics of ill health. Built in one of London’s poorest boroughs and commissioned by the local authority, the latter included a tuberculosis clinic, a dental surgery and a sunlamp solarium. In its provisions of health and welfare services it anticipated many of the National Health Service reforms that were to come in Britain’s post-war period. The centre was designed by Berthold Lubetkin, a socialist Russian émigré associated with a radical but optimistic school of modernist architecture, who had famously designed the penguin and ape houses at London Zoo. The Finsbury Centre was an expression of Lubetkin’s belief in the use of design and architecture as instruments to bring about social change and progress. One of the building’s characteristic features was the extensive use of glass bricks for many of the exterior walls and this was (together with the centre’s solarium) a calculated attempt to promote the material health benefits of sun and light, ‘not only from the point of view of hygiene but also as a medium of propaganda of light and air in the homes of the patients, and as a powerful stimulating psychological factor’ (Allan 1992: 334). The message of sunlight and health was reinforced by murals on the walls, with slogans such as ‘Live outdoors as much as you can’ and ‘Fresh air night and day’, to encourage patients to get into the fresh air and to expose themselves to sunlight. However the desire to redesign and produce innovations to admit sunshine into buildings was not restricted to the garden city movement and a few isolated health centres, even though these buildings and structures can be thought of as pioneering the new aesthetics of sunlight architecture. Thus in the early 1930s the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)6 formed a ‘Joint Committee to Consider the Orientation of Buildings’. The main brief of this new committee was to examine ‘methods of securing the maximum penetration of sunlight into buildings where such is desirable’ (RIBA 1933: 1). The committee was composed of seven members, one of whom was Leonard Hill, and the foreword to their eventual report was written by Sir Henry Gauvain. One problem identified by the committee was the issue of quantifying sunlight penetration into a building’s interior, so the report devoted a large amount of space to detailing the various ways of measuring sunlight in buildings. Other problems were identified with the practicalities of ensuring the entrance of sunlight into buildings when the

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position of the sun varies by time of day and by season, and thus the report also devoted an extensive section to the technical considerations of admitting sunlight into building structures. The report was mainly concerned with discussing public buildings such as hospitals and schools, rather than private dwellings. The opening paragraph set the tone of the remainder of the document: During the last few years an extraordinary and even revolutionary change has taken place in all countries in the general appreciation of – both by the medical profession and by the general public – the values of fresh air and light, particularly sunshine. The treatment of some diseases by exposure of the skin to the action of light, natural or artificial, has in a marvellously short space of time leaped from an obscure position of a somewhat contemptuously neglected specific to the status of one of the most valued and even invaluable weapons in the medical armoury. (RIBA 1933: 3) The report, in keeping with the general popular interest in sunlight, generated a fair degree of press interest and The Times, in 1932, carried a leader editorial based on an attenuated version of the report that later appeared in the journal of RIBA. This editorial comment praised the new demands that the report placed upon architecture to open buildings to sunlight. A place in the sun is now almost every one’s ambition, whether in a house or an office or an hotel. It was not always so; the attractive word ‘sun trap’ in the builders’ sense is quite new; and buildings of no great age stand on all sides to prove that light and air used not to be considerations as they are now. (The Times, 10 December 1932: 11)

HELIO-HUMANS In the shaping of a material heliosis – Unwin and Parker’s ‘healthy’ sunlight housing, the Midhurst Sanatoria, Williams’ Peckham Health Centre or Lubetkin’s Finsbury Health Centre – we can discern an anticipated rapprochement between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The healing powers of nature were to be materialized into the built environment by the admission of sunlight into the spaces used by people for living and healing. The designers of these buildings can be thought of as heterogeneous engineers who attempt to constitute irreducibly specific relations between sunlight, bodies, spaces and sociotechnical artefacts. The interaction between sunlight and humans can be conceptualized in terms of heterogeneous collective connections involving ‘elements of Nature and elements of the social world’ (Latour 1993: 107). As such the entities produced by these collective connections are hybrids composed of human and non-human actants – these ‘hybrid collectifs’ are ‘relations. Links. Interpenetrations. Processes. Of any kind’

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(Callon and Law 1995: 486). Hybrids of humans and non-humans are produced by networks that are symmetrical in terms of their co-production of nature and culture. In other words the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ do not exist as a priori categories but are co-productions that emerge in the process of network building – they are performative identities (Callon and Latour 1992). Entities such as nature, sunlight, the tanned skin, holistic medicine, the tuberculosis patient, social hygiene and even the city ‘slum’ did not exist independently of the networks that sought to produce them in particular ways. For example, to take one entity – nature: the medical holists positioned nature, via the rays of the sun, as a healer; the New Health Society hoped that a ‘raw’ nature would select the fittest to build a better Britain; Ebenezer Howard saw nature as a supplier of abundant gifts; and Parker and Unwin ascertained a dependent relationship between nature and human habitats. However, each of these identities had to be performed by a network composed of differing heterogeneous entities such as sunlamps, sanatoria, political movements, funding activities, houses and communities. What is more all these had to be built or produced to particular specifications. The attempted enrolment of these quasi-objects itself performed and produced differing identities for entities such as nature, the healthy body and the tanned skin. As Goodman has observed: ‘hybridity is a protean, multifaceted property of both the entities enrolled and the composite actor-network’ (Goodman 1999: 27). The building of a material heliosis began a process whereby living and healing structures were intentionally opened up to allow the permeation of sunlight and these rays then became an integral part of the building fabric. As such the helio-structure allows new quasi-objects to be formed between humans, sunlight and structures. This was an additional step towards what may be thought of as the emergence of the helio-human. For example, the structures of Unwin and Parker’s health house or Lubetkin’s Health Centre allowed new connections and disconnections (see Michael 2000) between bodies, natures, culture and environments. As architecture was opened up to sunlight, and fresh air, the body of its occupants gradually became connected to a nature that was ‘healing’ and ‘hygienic’, disconnected from an environment of ‘pollution’ and ‘depravity’. But of course the networks that supported these assemblages and gave rise to the helio-structures were in turn qualified by other heterogeneous networks. Thus, to give one example, the social hygiene movement sought to establish a network that produced sunlight exposure as a health-giving entity able to strengthen the human body. This network was sufficiently stabilized as a therapeutic regime that the translation ‘sunlight equals strength and health’ could be ‘punctualised’ (see Callon 1991) into other networks such as those of architecture and design. The success of this ‘punctualisation’ is further demonstrated by the widespread appearance of structures in the 1920s and 1930s concerned with the production of helio-humans. The most widespread of these was the lido – the open-air swimming pools that featured in many European parks of the period. Of course,

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there were other networks in play here, for example: the newly emerging idea of leisure activity, part established by workers campaigns for public holidays and a reduction in working hours; the newly emerging discourse of athleticism, given impetus by the commencement of the modern Olympic Games in 1896; and the need to find a useful function for the many people employed in the 1930s as part of the public works programmes to create labour for the unemployed. Many of the lidos conformed to a design loosely based on the standards and dimensions laid down by the Amateur Swimming Association. The basic features were a sunken pool surrounded by a low brick wall to act as a wind break or sun trap and to lend some privacy to the bathers. Most also included the provision of changing facilities and refreshments. Despite the simplicity of the design this architectural form occupies a special place in the social imaginary and is closely associated with pleasures that were uniquely available for the first time to large numbers of city dwellers. The lido was also distinct and contrasted with the more sober indoor swimming pools: In opening itself up to the skies, the lido paid homage to ‘unbounded nature’: it also offered the feel of fresh air on unclothed skin. It was not serious, like the indoor pool, which was a building to swim in, and in which one was totally indifferent to the elements outside, and which was essentially part of the urban environment. The lido was ambiguous, a halfway house between town and country, between London suburb and the Côte d’Azur, even between earth and heaven. (van Leeuwan, quoted in Worpole 2000: 113) The lido was more than just an area for swimming. Many had extensive zones around the pool that were laid out for deckchairs, recliners and sunbathing. In the 1930s this helped to create a new aesthetic for the display of the body within the city as ‘new spaces of public informality in the city, helped break down barriers between men and women in public, especially in minimal attire and partnudity’ (Worpole 2000: 114). At this time many seaside resorts still operated strict dress codes for bathers and it was commonly the case that many indoor pools did not allow men and women to stand on the same side. The innovation of the largely unrestricted lido bathing introduced a space that would later be found on the resort beach: ‘the lido resembled beach space in its promiscuous democracy of age, class, bodily shape and temperament’ (Worpole 2000: 115). In addition the lido introduced new architectural forms into European cities, just like the health centres discussed earlier. One of the most famous of these was the De La Warr Pavilion, completed in 1935 at Bexhill on Sea and designed by Eric Mendelsohn. This structure introduced into Britain for the first time the international modernist style, characterized by a marine aesthetic. The pavilion building housed the facilities associated with the outdoor lido and also included a library, theatre, restaurant and a sun parlour. The structure was completed in steel and concrete with a long, low mass of balconies edged with steel railings

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reminiscent of an ocean liner. The glass walls ran into a semicircular glass projection housing a large spiral stairway, which was thought to be evocative of a similar feature in the famous Schocken Store in Stuttgart. As Worpole has observed, it is possible to see that the De La Warr Pavilion, as well as introducing a new style of architecture to Britain, also ushered in a new era – the age of mass leisure and tourism in which sunlight was to play such an important role. As the socialist mayor of Bexhill, who gave his name to the pavilion, said prophetically during the opening ceremony: The laying of this plaque marks a great day in the history of Bexhill – we are embarking upon a new era. An era which is going to lead to the growth, the prosperity and the greater culture of our town. A venture which is part of a great national movement, virtually to found a new industry – the industry of giving that relaxation, that pleasure, that culture, which hitherto the gloom and dreariness of British resorts have driven our fellow countrymen to risk in foreign lands. (Earl De La Warr, quoted in Worpole 2000: 118)

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CHAPTER 8

Sunlight in Perspective: Pleasure, Sunlight and the Socio-sensual Environment

Looking back on the historical assemblage of the body in sunlight it is possible to draw certain conclusions, as much with an eye on current and contemporary developments as to the past. In previous chapters we have examined the role that sunlight and the sun’s rays have played in various sociotechnical figurations. One significant motif has been the various assemblages that have coalesced around the nexus made up of sunlight, bodies and health. Thus the outdoors movements, such as the Scouts or campers, the treatment of tuberculosis and rickets, the campaigning of the Sunlight League, and even sunlight architecture are drawn together in a common aim: the production of ‘healthy bodies’. Indeed the ‘healthy body’ was a crucial element in the attempts to establish the durability of these projects. Yet ultimately many of these sociotechnical projects unravelled and their network building reversed. For example, the advocates of both heliotherapy and actinotherapy failed in their attempts to constitute these therapies as mainstream medical practices – today even the names of these treatments appear archaic.1 Resistance to these attempted enrolments came from a variety of sources, for example: as Mellanby observed, it proved far simpler to ensure children had an adequate dietary intake of vitamin D than to establish a complex system of sunlamp provision in schools; tuberculosis microbes proved resistant to the sun’s rays with heliotherapy only being effective against certain forms of the disease; patients were often less than patient about the time and expense needed for sunlight treatment; and the medical profession were successfully enrolled by the competing collective of allopathic pharmacological medicine as found in the new antibiotics sponsored by the UK’s Medical Research Council.

SUNLIGHT AND TOURISM Yet these different assemblages did succeed in establishing an association between health and sunlight. For example, in the context of possible ‘cures’ for a widely feared illness, such as rickets or tuberculosis, many experts also sought

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to constitute the benefits of prophylactic exposure to sunlight by establishing a range of everyday practices and techniques to allow exposure of the human body. At the same time, those clinical sunlight therapies (and artificial light therapies) helped establish a set of practices whereby the human body could be immersed in the sun’s rays and acquire a tan with a minimum of discomfort. As we saw in the previous chapter, the network that sought to establish the sun cure was sufficiently stabilized as a therapeutic regime in the interwar years that the translation ‘sunlight equals strength and health’ could then be punctualized into other networks. For example, the equivalences of practices within the sanatoria regime and of modern tourism have been highlighted in the previous chapter – the modern tourist hotel and the TB sanatoria of the early twentieth century shared a commonality of material space (balconies, French windows, southerly aspects) and practices (inactivity/leisure). Indeed even commentators in the 1930s saw similarities between the sanatoria sunlight rest cure and practices associated with leisure and pleasure. Thus, one famous Canadian cartoon of the 1930s showed a caricatured ‘tramp’ walking past a sanatorium where patients are sunning themselves on a veranda. He stops a nurse carrying a drinks tray to ask ‘Say lady, how could a feller get himself a case of this TB?’ The medical regimes around heliotherapy established the helio-human hybrid as a network pattern which was then available to be drawn on by other networks. For example, as international tourism was becoming established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became possible for the helio-human hybrid to be inserted into the emerging tourism networks. Tourism, travel and mobility has increasingly become an object of social analysis (see Lash and Urry 1994; Urry 1990; Urry 2000) but the role of sunlight has often only been attributed a minor role in these examinations. However the helio-human hybrid was well placed to be translated into tourism networks for a variety of reasons that will now be considered. As Shields (1990) has observed, in his cultural analysis of the positioning of Brighton as a British seaside resort, there is often, at least initially, a correspondence between those zones associated with pleasure and liminality, and those associated with a medical or curative discourse. Thus several factors contributed to the transition from Brighton as a clinic to its more modern foundation as a liminal zone of pleasure. Brighton was first visited, as were many seaside resorts, because of the supposed curative effects identified with seawater and beach bathing. The resort was thus first used by wealthy visitors seeking cures for a variety of afflictions who then reproduced a version of ‘fashionable’ society within Brighton. Yet Brighton was also sufficiently far from the core of British society for the strict codes and mores of conduct to be somewhat relaxed. In addition, and compounding this, an atmosphere of liminality and carnival followed on from practices enacted on the beach where normal codes of behaviour were inverted. Bathers not only were stripped (literally) of social status but also came into direct physical contact with locals, often women, who

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lifted and plunged the reluctant bathers into the sea. These locals were therefore ‘intermediaries across the class divide’. But sea bathing also became a social spectacle and those engaging in this activity ‘were relentlessly spied upon from the promenade as they bathed naked by spectators who gathered to gossip and gawk’ (Shields 1990: 45). The sun-cure at sanatoria and health resorts also appeared to occupy a similar liminal zone. We saw in Chapter 5, within the health resorts used by wealthy tuberculosis sufferers, how the enforced inactivity led to tedium and boredom which patients attempted to relieve by amusing themselves with drinking and gambling parties (Smith 1988) and some of these were so rowdy that observers feared for the health of the tuberculosis sojourners (Lowe 1888). Indeed, as early as the turn of the twentieth century hotels in health resorts had begun to displace the tuberculosis sufferer in favour of the gambling pleasure seeker. The practice of bodily exposure to sunlight had already been established in these localities however for this to become a mainstream aspect of a leisure industry other changes needed to occur. For example, one change was the widespread promotion of actinic rays by organizations such as Saleeby’s Sunlight League. Here the principles of social hygiene were used to advance the benefits of sunlight as enhancing the health of the population. However, in the process of promoting helio-hygiene a number of related causes were also championed such as: the removal of urban pollution; the legitimating of the partially clothed body in urban spaces; and the idea that the act of sun exposure was itself a pleasurable activity leading to bodily strength and health.

SUNLIGHT AND THE BATHING COSTUME Furthermore, the conventions and practices around body exposure were in turn co-produced alongside a range of other sociotechnical entities. For example, the innovations in the attire worn for bathing had its own impact on the development of the seaside resort and a leisure industry based on sunlight. In the nineteenth century the Victorian demand for total decency and minimal bodily exposure had led to a decline in sea bathing and resorts ‘became less places of “health” and more places of “entertainment”’ (Stafford and Yates 1985: 116). Ironically, therefore, the restrictions on the public display of the human body helped move the resort from an association with health discourses to those of amusement and pleasure. Those bathing dresses that did exist were cumbersome and fabricated using textiles that ‘when wet became either heavy or transparent’ (Stafford and Yates 1985: 180). The impracticalities, and dangerous nature, of these garments for swimming meant that few continued to bath and instead the main activity at fashionable seaside resorts became the promenade. The benefits of the consumption of seawater gave way to the promotion of sea-air – advocated as a blood stimulant and general bodily tonic (Walvin 1978, see also Walton 1983,Yates 1988).

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The major changes in bathing habits, towards current sea-bathing practices, however occurred after the First World War. These were partially shaped by the activities of the Sunlight League, and its fellow organization the Men’s Dress Reform Party, which helped promoted a new interest in sunbathing, and contributed to a number of successful campaigns around dress codes at seaside resorts and the emerging lidos. Hence in the 1920s and 1930s it was still common for local authorities to require male bathers to wear ‘regulation’ bathing costumes. These covered the body from the knee to the neck and were heavy when wet. The Sunlight League and the MDRP lobbied for reforms to these dress codes on the basis of health. As Alfred Jordan wrote in Sunlight, when discussing the dress codes at the new Hyde Park Lido: ‘Health comes first; a bathing costume that keeps off the healing rays of the sun, and is – when wet – a hideous chilling affair, should be severely discouraged. Mr George Lansbury is on the side of health and common sense; if he has his own way (which is our way too) London will enjoy the sun at last!’ (Jordan 1930: 84).2 By the mid-1930s swimwear based on the briefer ‘bathing trunk’ had become common for men. Also in this period women’s bathing costumes became more ‘daring’ and, as the decade progressed, the introduction of elasticized fabrics allowed the innovation of stretch ‘skintight’ swimsuits and greater exposure of the body. Thus advertising literature for these new costumes described the fashionable woman bather as looking ‘willowy, pliant, soignée, sophisticated and disenchanted: languidly baring her back to the point of the lowest vertebrae’ (Lindsay 1983: 44). By the end of the 1930s specialist firms for the manufacture of swimwear had appeared with Slix of Derby being founded in 1937, thus further demonstrating the demand for the new activity of sun and sea bathing.

SUNLIGHT AND THE SUNCREAM The popular turn towards sunlight and the increasing association of the sun’s rays with pleasure was reflected in the tone of articles appearing in medical journals. Papers were now talking less in terms of curative outcomes, for specific diseases, such as tuberculosis, and more about the general health enhancement that sun exposure might bring. As Urquart wrote, in a 1933 copy of the British Medical Journal, suntanning is a ‘fashionable habit ... which when properly used, cannot fail to be of benefit to all’ (Urquart 1933: 150). Henry Gauvain went further than this and wrote in the Journal of State Medicine that the sun’s rays would not only benefit the physique but also improved mental health. ‘The sun bather who is benefiting from insolation is always cheerful and happy. None are brighter in spirits than those who are sun-worshippers’ (Gauvain 1930: 475). The sociotechnical practices associated with the medical exposure of bodies to sunlight were initially concerned with providing the physician with

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a technique to allow the patient to receive actinic rays, safely and without discomfort. Of course, this method was now available to all those who might wish to expose their bodies to sunlight. This was tacitly acknowledged in medical texts with the publication of papers providing advice for the heliophilic without necessarily assuming that they were suffering from any specific illness. One such example is provided in a 1933 paper from the Journal de Médecine de Paris, by a Dr Fougerat de Lastours. This is entitled ‘The ABC of Sunning Oneself’ (‘L’A.B.C. de L’ensoleillement’) and provides advice about how best to enjoy the benefit of sunlight while avoiding potential problems. This paper begins with common themes — namely hygiene and the classic origins of suntanning. ‘Light hygiene is the most precious form of hygiene available to man. Its origin goes back to ancient history’ (de Lastours 1933: 667). The essay then goes on to stress the need for careful preparation before any attempt at sun exposure is undertaken: one must prepare oneself, by preparing the skin for direct contact with the surrounding air: 1. Every morning, perform one’s ablutions NAKED; 2. Every day do at least 5 minutes of exercises NAKED; 3. Sleep NAKED, like our forefathers, which is, very often, at one and the same time, the best of remedies for insomnia. All this should be done, as much as possible in open air. (de Lastours 1933: 667) The stated goal of this ‘sun initiation’ was to obtain a ‘pigmentation of the skin while avoiding l’érythèmé [abnormal redness] of the skin which is always painful and sometimes dangerous’ (de Lastours 1933: 667). Other practical advice was offered that was obviously directed at the ‘tourist’ rather than ‘patient’ and included such tips as: an avoidance of going to the beach straight after getting off the train; and a rejection of any type of suncream, because they may cause permanent scars. However, medical opinion was not wholly of the opinion that the use of suncreams was dangerous. Indeed, the 1930s were marked by the appearance of a number of articles speculating about the ideal formula for a tanning cream, many of which appeared in French medical journals. Initially these formulas were used as part of a medical regime to allow greater therapeutic exposure of the patient to the sun’s rays. For example, La Presse Médicale, carried a short note entitled ‘Quelques formules de products pour brunir’ (Juster 1934).3 This document also talks of particular formulas for browning oils that ‘have the advantage of being easily absorbed without giving the skin an oily look’ (Juster 1934: 1331) – a claim that still features in advertisements for suntanning creams.

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Yet the suncreams mentioned in medical journals were still only available to the physicians and pharmacists. This was about to change with the first appearance of a commercially marketed suncream produced by the French cosmetics company L’Oréal. The company was originally established in 1908 by the chemist Eugene Schueller, to market his invention of a novel hair- colouring product. However Schueller, as well as being a chemist, was also a keen amateur sailor. But because of his fair complexion he tended to suffer from sunburn while pursuing his hobby. He initially experimented with some of his own formulations that ‘cooked’ rather than protected (‘l’échec est cuisant’). Thus he eventually asked the chemists working at L’Oréal laboratories to develop a sun protection cream. In April 1935 Schueller’s chemists presented him with a ‘sun oil’ containing various protective filters that allowed the unclothed body to be exposed to solar radiation without burning. Had the story ended here the new sun protection might have remained a specialist product used only by Schueller or a few yachtspersons. However Schueller, in a similar way to the story of Lever and Sunlight Soap, was not only an inventor of new artefacts but also a pioneer of novel methods of marketing, such as the commissioning of graphic artists to design distinctive advertising posters. The new suncream was launched in June 1935 on the French Riviera under the brand name ‘Ambre Solaire’. It was sold in a characteristic brown bottle that was shaped with scallops to facilitate gripping. The following year the Ambre Solaire bottle was marketed throughout France (Reybaud 2002), with posters depicting the shaped bottle and the browned bodies of women in the new swimsuits. At the time of Ambre Solaire’s first appearance, France was in the midst of an economic and political crisis. The Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing parties, had won an election victory in May 1936 against the background of a massive national strike and workers occupation of factories. Contemporary commentators were struck by the generally good-humoured atmosphere and sense of a ‘holiday feeling’ during these spontaneous factory occupations (Phillippe and Dubief 1993). Once Léon Blum, France’s first Socialist Prime Minister, assumed office a series of agreements, known as the Matignon Accords were negotiated and concluded with the unions. These ended the strikes and workplace occupations in return for increased wages, a forty-hour working week and two weeks paid annual vacation for all workers. With the majority of the French population suddenly enjoying paid leave the beaches of France (‘les plages de l’Hexagone’) filled up with tourists seeking to emulate the wealthy visitors who had long frequented fashionable resorts along the French coast.4 With its scalloped brown bottle and the name that was so evocative of the sun – Ambre Solaire enjoyed immediate success and rapidly, at least within Europe, became synonymous with holidays, pleasure and the summer. As Schueller remarked:5 ‘le bon produit au bon moment’.6

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SUNLIGHT, THE TOURIST GAZE AND THE FRENCH RIVIERA With the development of bathing costumes and the new suncreams the heliohuman was becoming the object of spectacle and display. The sun’s rays, mediated by the new sun oils and the new bathing costumes, were now being used to alter that aesthetic of the European body. Bodies browned by the sun’s rays were now being reproduced as beautiful, healthy and strong. But this new aesthetics of the helio-human body was produced for the visual consumption of others – whether in the city lido or the seaside resort.Vision, it has frequently been noted, is the pre-eminent Western sense (see Urry 2000) and Urry’s analysis of modern leisure travel discusses the centrality of the visual to the tourist experience7 – he notes how the central characteristic of tourism is the way that people use the gaze to collect signs that are visually extraordinary. In particular Urry identifies two forms of the tourist gaze: first, the romantic gaze in which the traveller will consume visual signs in solitude, with other tourists being an intrusion; and second, the collective gaze in which other ‘people are necessary to give atmosphere or a sense of carnival to the place’ (Urry 1992: 173). The modern tourist resort is in many respects organized around the idea of the collective gaze, but an important part of this visual consumption involves the suntanned body itself becoming an object of gaze – the innovations around swimwear and suncreams allowed an increased exposure of the human body to the rays of the sun, but also a greater self-conscious observation of the body. In this respect the helio-human has become a significant feature of leisure and travel – the suntan is a visual symbol for the consumption of others and is acquired within the gaze of others. Originally the gaze was that of the approving medical professional but now this medical gaze has been replaced with the self-reflexive tourist’s own gaze. So the typical seaside (and some mountain) resorts followed a trajectory from health to touristic location – from a place people went to regain their health, via inactivity and sun exposure, to somewhere they went while seeking enjoyment and pleasure, which also often involved inactivity and sun exposure. This was probably most marked along the European Mediterranean coastline of the interwar years, where the replacement of the sick by the affluent seeking enjoyment, was fully underway. This coincided with a transition from the Riviera being mainly visited in the winter season, to its increasing use during the summer period (see Howarth 1977). This transition was aided by developments such as the more widespread availability of air-conditioning and the elimination of the mosquito pest. But this translation was also aided by the marketing of the region as an exclusive playground for the rich and famous, which was partially achieved by using the sun as a signifier of sensuality and health. All this helped to establish the Riviera as a liminal zone, and the activity of tanning as pleasurable and healthy. The inactivity, which was originally part of the convalescent sun cure, now

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became a marker of affluence and health. In the 1920s and 1930s many activities, which articulated well with sun exposure, also became fashionable, such as water-skiing and underwater fishing. This general transition was marked by the appearance of the helio-human in literature. For example, Hemingway’s novel, The Garden of Eden, set on the Riviera of the 1920s, puts much emphasis on one of the central characters’ desire to tan herself as deeply as possible,8 and in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Rosemary’s first visit to a Riviera beach was marred by her un-tanned body: Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. (Fitzgerald 1995: Chapter 1) By the late 1920s the practice of sunbathing was well established on the French Riviera. The exposure of the tanned female body was further legitimated through the establishment of ‘beauty’ pageants, often staged under the auspices of local Riviera casinos. Thus in 1929 the Belle Plage at Cannes began to host what was to become a regular ‘Miss Suntan’ competition (see Blume 1992). One other development in the interwar years was finally to help wrest the suntan from its medical associations while, at the same time, further establishing sunlight as a signifier of health, leisure and pleasure – the increasing fascination with the bodies of film stars.

STARS AND SUNLIGHT The rise of the film industry, and in particular the emergence of the figure of the celebrity, articulated well with the emerging helio-human. As Dyer (1979) has observed, the interwar years were a period of transformation in the way that films were culturally consumed with an increasing public focus on movie actors. This was the birth of the Hollywood star system – popular interest in the lives of actors. This fascination with movie stars was actively used by the film industry to market films. Yet, according to Dyer, the film business was keen to hide the fact that it was an industry at all – to explicitly acknowledge this would reveal that the product manufactured was fantasy. Therefore stars were often depicted in such a way as to suggest that they did not have to work.‘Thus a man’s athletic body [such as Clark Gable’s] may be admired, but only on condition that it has been acquired through sports not labour’ (Dyer 1979: 43). The activity of sunbathing was one such way in which the new stars of film could be displayed as leisured, healthy and wealthy. Consequently the Riviera became a popular holiday resort for the stars to be seen at. During the 1930s Charles Chaplin, Gloria

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Swanson, Ronald Coleman and William Powell were all publicly noted to have spent luxurious holidays on the French Riviera. In 1938 ‘the Palm beach Casino’s principal attraction was Marlene Dietrich, who was reported during this visit to Cannes to have indulged in sunbathing for the first time in her life’ (Howarth 1977: 177). The final durable link between the stars and the sun was the Cannes Film Festival, held for the first time in the September of 1939. There is evidence to suggest that the influence of the film industry was more than a marginal influence in shaping the suntan as a cultural phenomenon. The appearance of advertisements for new suntanning products in the late 1930s played on the connection between film stars and their suntans. In the summer of 1939, a series of advertisements appearing in Woman’s Weekly show the forging, not only of a link between film stars and a suntan, but also make reference to how a woman sporting a tan was a ‘goddess’ – a link which simultaneously references film stars but also refers classical origins of sunlight exposure in a similar way to the neo-Hippocratic movement: Make up all over this summer. Just smooth on Miner’s Liquid Make-up wherever your swim-suit (or play suit) isn’t. And then you’ll have face, back, arms, and legs – all with a matt, tinted, suntan finish like a film star’s complexion. The suntan shades (blond and brunet) make you look like a golden-tanned goddess, when the sun (and others!) are out to kiss you. (Woman’s Weekly, July 1939: 89) and: The Hollywood film stars firmly believe in sunbathing for skin beauty. Here is a photo of Gloria Dickens (Warner Bros. and Vitaphone). What a lovely back she has! (Woman’s Weekly, July 1939: 114)

CONCLUDING REMARKS In this book, I have attempted to sketch the emergence, in the first part of the twentieth century, of a new relationship between human bodies and sunlight – the emergence of the helio-human. The post-Second World War period saw this emergence consolidated with the growth of mass sun-seeking via international tourism, and the increasing desire for Europeans and North Americans to acquire a tanned body. However, many of our contemporary sociotechnical artefacts linking bodies and sunlight can be traced to the period discussed here. Their present form may have superficial differences but many of the underlying practices would be immediately identifiable to those helioadvocates from the interwar years. For example, the actinotherapists sought to establish a regime which would have led to sunlamps and solariums in every

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school, hospital and workplace. This project failed to become durable for a variety of reasons, some of which have been suggested above. Yet today on virtually every British high street there are tanning studios where people can pay to be exposed to ultraviolet lamps that, in many respects, are the direct descendants of the lamps proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century by the helio-advocates.9 I have traced some of the ways in which a study of the material and semiotic roles of the sun can illuminate a number of key social, cultural and historical trajectories that the body has performed within sunlight. Moreover the social ordering of the helio-human was enacted using an assortment of resources and mediated by a number of sociotechnical innovations, including: therapeutic practices, leisure practices, medical and other texts, buildings, sun lamps, social movements, and local through to national legislation. I began by examining how artefacts were used to isolate bodies from the sun (the ‘sola topi’) or how visual aspects of the sun’s influence on bodies were minimized (the artificial whitening of women’s bodies). Yet simultaneously travellers were admiring the brown bodies of others as offering a link to a more direct and sensuous physicality. Fears about the moral degeneracy of young men and the deleterious effects of urban life contributed to the reification of ‘nature’ within the scouting and camping movements, with the suntan becoming a marker of ‘good character’ and moral fortitude. The theme of urban depravity and the powers of ‘nature’ to ‘do good’ were in turn drawn on by those advocating heliotherapy and actinotherapy. However the powers of sunlight were now being attached to a range of sociotechnical artefacts (e.g. sunlamps, sanatoria, medical regimes and localities) as part of a project to stabilize a new social figuration in which the population of northern regions would, via the application of social hygiene, become fit and strong. The need to expose the body to sunlight was further advocated by the Sunlight League whose project to establish helio-hygiene became embroiled with campaigns around smoke abatement and dress codes. Finally the garden city movement and the ‘sunlight architects’ sought to fabricate new solar environments for everyday living and leisure. In my analysis of sunlight I have (albeit rather loosely) been using a language derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and specifically from actor network theory (ANT). To remain in this voice for a while longer we could consider the constitution of the helio-human to be an effect of various heterogeneous networks. These networks were accomplished by an enormous amount of work that disciplined the various social, human and non-human entities so that they work collectively, instead of ‘making off on their own’ (Law 1992). However the helio-human was not constituted by a single network, but emerged out of a multitude of heterogeneous networks. Now there may have been some entities that traversed and intersected with many of these networks, such as, to name a few: ‘nature’ as a healing force; the problematic sick and pallid body; the medical texts of Rollier; and even characters like Leonard Hill, who appeared in the

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narratives concerning actinotherapy, heliotherapy, the People’s League of Health and sunlight architecture. But, be that as it may, the networks themselves enjoyed a relative independence from one another. For example, Baden-Powell’s Scouting or Paton and Findlay’s rachitic child shared a problematization of the urban environment, but little else. ‘Medical holists’ like Leonard Hill and the socialist sunlight architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin had in common projects that sought to create sunlight environments that would ‘naturally’ bring health to the body but whose more extended assemblages would be less commensurate. Throughout this analysis I have always resisted the impulse to look behind the various networks we have considered in order to suggest that any single entity, whether it be ‘back to naturism’, fears about urban depravity, the sanatoria, social hygiene texts or even Caleb Saleeby, was ultimately responsible for the emergence of the helio-human. The helio-human was, and still is, a complex figure composed of multiple strands. It was and is a co-produced figure that both ‘embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions’ (Jasanoff 2004: 3). However, if we continue too far with the metaphor of the network then certain problems may arise with this account of emergence: namely, how can such a hybrid continue to exist when the assemblages that gave it life are no longer present? Taking a symmetrical approach we should be interested in the specificities of both durable and failed technologies. In this respect, as we have seen, many of the networks considered here, such as heliotherapy, actinotherapy, the Men’s Dress Reform Party or the garden cities, could be regarded as failed sociotechnical figurations. Yet many of these networks have helped established a durable, albeit unintended, helio-human hybrid of bodies, sunlight and health. It appears as though bits and pieces of the networks we considered in previous chapters escaped or leaked and then tumbled through other networks, sometimes making partial connections, sometimes being punctualized, or sometimes taking on modified novel identities. And all the while the original networks were unravelling and withering, yet the helio-human survived and expanded. The problem then is to provide an account of the helio-human and its seeming enduringness – today sunlight is something we still welcome in our homes; it is something that most of us desire during our holidays; our supermarkets and drugstores are filled with artefacts to modify the sun’s effects, while still allowing exposure; and sunshine and the suntan is something we now routinely associate with good health even when repeatedly told otherwise by current medical opinion (Carter 1997). The bits and pieces that comprise the many stranded figure of the helio-human originated within the networks we considered previously and these networks can themselves be thought of as a series of interlocking hybrid chains. As Callon and Law describe: There isn’t a reality on one hand, and a re-presentation of that reality on the other. Rather, there are chains of translation. Chains of translation of varying

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length. And varying kinds. Chains which link things to texts, texts to things, and things to people. And so on ... Chains which make things, the texts, and the people. Chains in which the making and the re-presenting cannot be distinguished. Except locally, and for certain purposes. (Callon and Law 1995: 501) This description seems to summarize neatly one account for the emergence of the helio-human – varying chains of things, texts and people. However this version of the network is a long way from the managerial version of the heterogeneous engineer found in some earlier accounts of ANT – the builder who mobilizes assemblages of people and things to realize a project such as in Latour’s account of Louis Pasteur (Latour 1988). While within such a network agency or action may be distributed there is still an implied commanding innovator behind the network. Later studies drawing on ANT have been keen to stress a more fluid and mobile version of a network – one where the success or otherwise of the sociotechnical artefact does not ‘depend on an engineer who masters the situation’ (De Laet and Mol 2000: 227). Rather, fluid entities may maintain their stability by shifting their boundaries and identities – by becoming a different object according to its environment. My account of the helio-human has certainly involved many and varied heterogeneous ‘engineers’ who, for the most part, only managed briefly to successfully mobilize people, things and texts into their projects. But once set in motion bits and pieces of the nexus made up of the sun, the body, and health made off on their own – with the ‘engineers’ and their original projects rapidly disappearing. The success of the helio-human may partially be because of the very absence of the ‘engineer’ and their rigid network which may allow a more fluid movement and mobility. As a more fluid entity the helio-human can move freely becoming: here an indication of worthy outdoor manliness; or there a body strengthened by nature; or a nomadic traveller seeking sensuous pleasure. However, this still does not resolve the thorny issue of the enduringness of the helio-human. One the one hand the helio-human is a specific co-production emanating from the assembled chains of ‘texts, things and people’ and yet, on the other hand, its persistence is experienced as little more than a resonance of those original and long-gone ‘texts, things and people’. It may be that there was a potential latency established by the varied networks that co-produced the helio-human and this was sustained by other networks (such as those of tourism or leisure), on a moment-by-moment basis – in local processes and contexts. However, my key point here is that the helio-human was sustained on differing levels and that an aspect of these could ‘carry over’ to contexts where a reverberation or resonance, or even habitus, could be established (Bourdieu 1977). An embodiment of dispositions, preferences and cultural structures grounded in the bodily practices of individuals and groups.

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It should be remembered that it is only relatively recently that the desire to acquire a suntan has become a truly mass phenomenon. There are many manifestations of this including the many products available today to mediate the sun’s rays. However another indication of the presence of the helio-human is the rapid growth in holidays taken abroad over the last forty years. In the United Kingdom, just over 3 million Britons travelled overseas for holidays in 1960, but by 1992 this number had grown to almost 22 million (Central Statistical Office 1994), while in 2005 over 65 million visits were made abroad by UK residents (National Statistics Online 2006). Obviously ‘sun seeking’ is not the only reason for overseas travel, but the high proportion of people visiting regions with assured levels of sunshine (e.g. Spain, Greece, Italy and Florida) suggests that sunlight does play an important role. However, despite the recent growth of sun seeking, as a factor in the selection of holiday destinations, many of our contemporary mediations between sunlight and bodies can be traced to the pre-war period discussed here. A related methodological issue, explored by Michael (Michael 2000), follows from this and touches on the making of analytical ‘choices’ around the composition of hybrids (or ‘co-agents’ as Michael calls them). When we analytically wrestle with these heterogeneous entities we are attempting to pay attention to interactions between sociotechnical entities that are distributed. The methodological point that follows is that the hybrid (or co-agent) is a tool or an analytical fabrication as much as it is an entity, and the analyst always makes choices about what to include and exclude in this fabrication. The helio-human is of course precisely such a composition – a figure that emerged from both the interwar years and from the final chapters of this book, with many choices being made about what to include and exclude from its constitution. The point of these circumscribed amalgams of human and non-human ‘is that they allow us to explore some of the complex heterogeneous interactions that make up social ordering processes’ (Michael 2004: 10) and to illuminate hidden or long-obscured phenomena. In this historical account I hope to have revealed something of the complex heterogeneous interactions that socially and materially order the helio-human. Yet at the same time this account is a ‘cultural fiction’ because it is based on systematic and contestable exclusions (Clifford et al. 1986) and, as indicated in the Introduction, a different author could no doubt arrive at a different range of ordering processes to account for the relationship between bodies and sunlight. I will however mention one exclusion – the present constitution of the heliohuman. In order to illuminate the phenomena of the human body in sunlight I judged it was more important to persuade the reader of some unexpected aspects about its past. However this should not then be taken to imply that the helio-human is in some way a static figure. If anything in recent years the figure of the helio-human has become more complex with additional strands appearing. I will finally consider two of these additional strands.

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First, the suntan has become an element in a narcissistic identity performance based on self-surveillance and the consumption of sociotechnical artefacts (Featherstone 1982; Lasch 1976). In the post-war period, it has been argued, changes in the composition of Western class structures have led to concerns about identity formation being defined more by relation to processes of consumption than those of production (e.g. job or profession). Thus, according to this argument, consumption involves the reflexive manipulation of symbolic goods and ‘cultural capital’ to construct an idea of the self and its relations with others (Bauman 1992). In other words the consumption and use of artefacts can be opportunities for a display of identity, ‘taste’ and social differentiation (Bourdieu 1984). The suntan has certainly become a marker of taste with complex social differentiations between the authentic and inauthentic suntan. For example, popular celebrity magazines frequently run features with titles like ‘fake tan disasters’ that include a series of photos of famous people arranged in order of ‘orangeness’. Here the tan acquired through either the overuse of a sunbed or by the hurried application of artificial tanning products is thought to reveal some aspect of ‘undesirable social origins’. The similarities with fashion and beauty guides at the beginning of the twentieth century (see Chapter 2) are obvious. The suntan as a marker of health has given way to distinctions between various ‘wrong types’ of suntan. Second, as we saw in the Introduction, in recent years the discourse of risk has been brought to bear on the body exposed to the sun, with warnings and articles in newspapers, magazines and health-promotion leaflets given out in doctors’ surgeries. Yet resonances and traces of debates from the 1920s, about the benefits or otherwise of sunlight, still emerge. While I was in the final states of preparing this book I came across a full-page feature article in the Sunday Times of 1 January 2006. The article was entitled ‘KILL OR CURE?’ with a strapline: ‘First we are told to keep out of the sun to avoid skin cancer. Now a study suggests the resulting vitamin D deficiency can give us other cancers. Is health advice doing us harm?’ (Rogers 2006). This article appears to be part of the reflexive engagement with expertise that regularly sees the advice given out by health educators undermined by contradictions within expert discourse itself. Yet it also occurred to me that many of the elements in this article could have appeared in the 1928 special ‘Sunlight’ edition of The Times, appearing seventy-eight years earlier. As was mentioned in the Introduction there has recently been increasing public health anxieties about the possible ill effects of sun exposure. It is ironic that public health discourses which helped establish sunlight as a healthy attribute are now trying to reverse this figuration. This serves as a reminder that the body in sunlight is always mediated by the sociotechnical assemblages surrounding it. It also helps to demonstrate that the continuing and changing relations of bodies to their environments continue to be influenced by the residual figurations explored in this book.

Notes

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

2

I roughly estimated that each brand had around fifteen products available connected with sun exposure – which means that there were around 300 different sun-related products for the consumer to deliberate over with arguably little to guide them in making their selection. Although during previous research (Carter 1997) respondents reported that they do not feel like they have had a proper holiday unless they have been sunburnt at least once.

CHAPTER 2 BEYOND THE PALE: SUN, DANGER AND SUNLIGHT 1 2

This trip was arranged by John Cook, the senior partner of Thomas Cook. I have mainly discussed Britain and North America but there is good reason to suppose that similar debates were occurring in other northern regions, especially those with colonial possessions (e.g. France and Germany).

CHAPTER 3 THE MOVE TO THE GREAT OUTDOORS: CAMPING, CAMPERS AND THE ‘WORTHY SUNTAN’ 1

2

This is not to say that ‘white’ as a category suddenly ceased to have any importance, merely the use of the term as an explicit racial category in political discourse. Of course, ‘white’ remained an enormously powerful category but one that was largely established through articulations and figurations of difference (Dyer 1997). Bonnet also charts how in parallel to the racial category of ‘white’, declining the idea of the ‘West’ arose (Bonnett 2003). The modern character of the vampire was probably first created by John Polidori in The Vampyre (1819). The original character was part based on folklore and was part modelled on Polidori’s friend Lord Byron.

112 3

Notes Interestingly within North America a similar movement, looking to nature for stimulus, can be traced to Ralph Waldo Emerson. However whereas Ruskin rejected any relationship between industry and nature, Emerson ‘saw within it organic principles that could be emulated by both art and industry, and in doing so he was blazing the trail that led to Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller’ (Naylor 1971). Additionally, in much of his writing Emerson also draws a link between the sun and the positive powers of nature: ‘To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood’ (Emerson and Pelikan 1989).

CHAPTER 4 SUNSHINE, HYGIENE AND THE SUN CURE: PART 1 – RICKETS, SUNLIGHT AND ACTINOTHERAPY 1

2

3

The chemistry of vitamin D, as it finally came to be understood, is somewhat more complex than this – certain fats are transformed in the body into precursor molecules, which must then undergo further transformations in the liver and kidneys to become a substance the body can use. Leonard Hill was the father of Austin Braford Hill who went on to become Professor of Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and worked with Richard Doll on establishing the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. For example, the 1928 MRC Special Report by Cathart and Murray on working-class families in Reading and Cardiff that of the 113 families studied around seventy received less income a week than had been estimated as the minimum to provide an adequate diet (Cathart and Murrray 1932).

CHAPTER 5 SUNSHINE, HYGIENE AND THE SUN CURE: PART 2 – TUBERCULOSIS AND HELIOTHERAPY 1

Reasons for this decline are speculative but two have been suggested. The first, and most common explanation, is that tuberculosis is a disease of poverty but socioeconomic conditions had been steadily improving in this period, and this slowed the rate of new infections as living conditions in urban centres improved. The second explanation is more pessimistic – tuberculosis infection is strongly mediated by human genetic susceptibility and those people who were most susceptible to this illness had simply died out leaving a far more resistant population (Bates 1992).

Notes 2 3

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For example, in 1901 the annual death rate for tuberculosis in England and Wales was 128 per 100,000 people. Surgical treatments for pulmonary tuberculosis involved procedures such as: an artificially induced pneumothorax where the chest was pierced by a hollow tube to allow sterile air to be pumped in to artificially collapse a lung; or the removal of ribs from one side of the chest.

CHAPTER 6 HELIOSIS: PART 1 – LEAGUES OF SUNSHINE 1 2

3 4 5

6 7

8

9

He later claimed that this was the first person to be admitted to a maternity hospital bed anywhere in the world (Saleeby 1929). Saleeby also claimed to have invented the terms ‘positive eugenics’ (e.g. encouraging the ‘best’ elements of a population to reproduce) and ‘negative eugenics’ (e.g. discouraging the ‘undesirable’ elements of a population from reproducing). He is also credited with popularizing the term ‘smog’ (Popenoe 1969). He was also a member of the Sociological Society and the Fabian Society. See Ashby and Anderson (1981) for an account of this. Smoke was no respecter of even sacred boundaries. Writers in the nineteenth century, during periods of particularly bad winter pollution, commented on the poor air quality while attending choral recitals in Westminster Abbey. At these it was often difficult to see the choir because of smoke pollution in the nave (see Pemble 1987). She also recommended the squatting position for defecating to combat constipation and dystocia. Inge was a well-known eugenisist who had written on the decline of the ‘white race’ (see Chapter 2). He had also given support to the Sunlight League and had presided over the marriage ceremony of Caleb Saleeby. In the 1920s Sickert had already established a reputation for dressing incongruously, often appearing at formal occasions wearing slippers and ‘loud’ check suits. The initial call for membership gave the same address as the New Health Society: 39 Bedford Square, London WC1.

CHAPTER 7 HELIOSIS: PART 2 – BUILDING WORKS OF SUNLIGHT 1

He specialized in the invention of mechanical devices to record shorthand in court rooms.

114 2

3 4 5

6

Notes Bellamy’s most famous work, Looking Backward 2000–1887, enjoyed considerable success in the United States. The story’s hero falls asleep in a sealed Boston cellar, is revived 113 years later and begins to compare the new world he finds with the world of 1887. The future world created by Bellamy is a utopian fantasy: where the state distributes consumer goods; all the streets are wide and tree lined with fine buildings; where excessive individualism has been curtailed; and all surplus wealth is used to for the adornment of the city. As Osborn said of the Parker and Unwin design philosophy: ‘you live only inside one house, but outside all the others’ (Bayley 1975). Unwin boasted that he had designed Letchworth so that it could be built with only one pre-existing tree having to be destroyed. Creese has compared the typical simple style of Parker and Unwin to the Steiner House of Adolf Loos (1910) and dubbed this ‘proto-Internationalism’ (Creese 1966). At this point Raymond Unwin had become the President of RIBA.

CHAPTER 8 SUNLIGHT IN PERSPECTIVE: PLEASURE, SUNLIGHT AND THE SOCIO-SENSUAL ENVIRONMENT 1

2

3

4

5

Although both still enjoy minor roles as medical therapies (today known as phototherapy) for the treatment of conditions such as psoriasis. In addition heliotherapy centres still exist in some locations such as India and Egypt (Ness et al. 1999). The reference to George Lansbury refers to his position as the First Commissioner of Works in the second Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. In this capacity, he was linked to the building of a large lido in Hyde Park, popularly known as ‘Lansbury’s Lido’. Although articles such as these implicitly assume that a tan was worth achieving, it is significant that the modern language of the tan had not yet emerged. This paper uses the verb ‘brunir’, which literally means to brown, and can be applied to anything, for example skin, hair, food. Nowadays ‘bronzer’ would be used in the context of getting a tan (‘to bronze oneself’), rather than ‘brunir’. In Britain the idea of the paid holiday had become a negotiating point between workers and employers in the 1920s. In the 1930s the Trades Union Congress began campaigning for legislation to ensure that holidays-with-pay became a right for everyone. In 1938 legislation was passed through Parliament but due to the outbreak of war was not fully implemented until the post-war era. This is not to imply that Schueller was in favour of the Matignon Accords or the increased rights of French workers under the socialist Government

Notes

6

7

8

9

115

of Blum. Indeed historical evidence suggests that Schueller’s own political views were in opposition to developments in France. For example he funded an extreme right-wing organization (Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire) during the Second World War, was in favour of a radical reduction in workers’ rights and allegedly had extreme racist and anti-Semitic views (see Gordon 1975 for a detailed account of this period in French history). The North American history of suncream has a slightly different genealogy. American soldiers stationed in the south Pacific during the Second World War were suffering from serious sunburn. A pharmacist, Benjamin Greene, worked on a compound to protect soldiers from sun’s harmful rays and formulated a sticky, red substance which he called ’red vet pet’. After the war he reformulated this red paste into a sunscreen which he began to market in and around Miami. On the basis of his invention Greene founded the Coppertone Company. This is also another correspondence between medicine and tourism. The visual is also central to many medical discourses and the idea of the clinical gaze has been central to many of the practices of medicine, not least amongst those of heliotherapy and actinotherapy (Elden 2003). This desire to tan as deeply as possible may have been used by Hemingway to signify this character’s oversexualized traits which eventually led her and the other main characters to disaster. A number of years ago I lived in Glasgow, the capital of the west of Scotland noted for its wet climate and poor health. A city that was also famed for its large number of tanning studios. I always enjoyed reading the creative names given to these studios. Here is a far from exhaustive list: Hollywood Tanning, The Sun Lounge, Tanning Connection, Bronze Connections, City Beach, Sun Village, Sundowners, Su’Sun Tanning Zone, Body Bronzing, Tanzone, Tans, Solas, Sunset Beach, Tantasia Tanning Studio, Tantastic, Chic Tanning Studio, Taneriefe Tanning Studio, Mastertan, Tanning World, Tan Inn, The Sunshack, Meltin, Sun Rays,Tan Sun, Glow Salon and Sun Seekers.

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Index

Ackerknecht, E., 69 actinic rays, 13 actinotherapy, 9, 43, 45, 46, 52, 97 and classical origins, 58 and hygiene, 60 and need for medical supervision, 45, 52 actor-network theory, 6–7, 93, 106, 108 agency, 71, 108 Ajax Sunlight Apparatus, 46 Alexandra Palace, 80 Allan, J., 91 Amateur Swimming Association, 94 Ambre Solaire, 102 Anderson, M., 75n4 Anderson, W., 14 Arbuthnot Lane, William, 68, 74 aristocratic debauchery, 30–2 and age of consent legislation, 31 and masculinity, 30 artificial sunlight treatment, 44 and actors, 46 and advertisements, 46–7 and animals, 46 and clinical trials, 47 and politics, 44 Arts and Crafts Movement, 36 Ashbee, C., 36 Ashby, E. 75n4 autonomy of physicians, 66 Baden-Powell, R., 33, 34 Barker, H., 63 Bates, B., 50n1 bathing costumes, 99–100 and dress codes, 94, 100 Bayley, S. 85, 87n3 Beard, George, 14 beauty care and ‘self help’ books, 18 Beck, U., 4 Belfrage, Henning, 68 Bellamy, Edward, 86

Benjamin, Walter, 5 Bennet, James Henry, 23 Bexhill on Sea, 94 biomedical paradigm, 65 birth rate and differential rates between classes, 33 and middle classes, 77 Bishop, W., 58 Blacker, B., 52–3 Bloor, D., 6 Blum, Léon, 102 Blume, M., 104 body aesthetics, 31, 94, 103 body techniques, 7 Bond, Charles John, 74 Bondfield, Margaret, 67 Bonnet, A., 28, 30, 30n1 Booth, Catherine, 31 Booth, William, 84 Bourdieu, P., 5, 108, 110 Bowker, G., 49, 50 Boys’ Brigade, 33 Bragg, W.H., 74 Brighton, 98 British Broadcasting Corporation, 80 British Hanovia Quartz Lamp Co. Ltd., 47 British Journal of Actinotherapy, The, 45 British Journal of Nursing, The, 44 British Medical Association, 60, 63 British Medical Journal, 17, 43, 47, 54, 56, 100 British Modern Movement, 90 Brown, S., 7 Bryder, L., 90 Burdett, O., 80 Burman, B., 80–1 Butler, Josephine, 31 Butt, Sir Alfred, 46 Byngham, Dion, 80 Byron, Lord, 32n2

130

Index

Callon, M., 6, 8, 93, 107 camping as leisure activity, 35–7 and bicycles, 35 and pastoralism, 36 Cannes Film Festival, 105 Cantile, J., 29 Cantor, D., 65, 70 Carpenter, Edward, 36, 83, 87 Carter, S., 3n2, 4, 107 Cathart E., 44n3 Cawadias, Alexander, 60–1, 69, 70 Chamberlain, Neville, 74 Chaplin, Charles, 104 Clarke, R., 52–3 Clifford, J., 109 climate and ill health, 12–16 Colebrook, Dora, 47 Coleman, Ronald, 105 colonialism and alienation, 14 and masculine crisis, 17 and medicine, 14 and permanent settlement in the tropics, 15 and travel, 11 Cook, John, 23n1 co-production, 93, 99, 108 Corry Mann, Harold, 41–2 Corson, R., 18, 19 cosmetics, 18–19 Creese, W.L., 84, 86, 87 culturalized materiality, 5–6 Curle, J., 29 Curtin, P. 12 Curzon, Lord, 29 Daily Sketch, 79 Davey Smith, G., 6 De la Ramée, Louise, 23 De La Warr Pavillion, 94 De Laet, M., 7, 108 De Lastours, Fougerat, 101 De Maupassant, Guy, 57 deficiency diseases, 40 degeneracy, 32 and city, 29 and sexual morality, 33 and working class, 29 Dental Board of the UK, 60 Dietrich, Marlene, 105 diseases of darkness, 74 Dodds, Leonard, 61 Doll, Richard, 42n2 Dracula, 32

Dubief, H., 102 Dyer, R., 30n1, 104 Earl De La Warr, 95 Eden, Emily, 23 Einstein, Albert, 42 emancipation of women, 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36n3 Empire Theatre, 31 Enzensberger, C., 75–6 epidemiology, 6 eugenics, 14, 66 and degeneracy of population, 42 and People’s League of Health, 67 and positive and negative, 72n2 and Saleeby, Caleb, 73 and white crisis, 29 Evening Standard, 79 Evil Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, 13 Fabian Society, 73n3 fashion industry, 80 Featherstone, M., 110 Ferguson, M., 40 Findlay, L., 41, 42, 78, 107 Finsbury Health Centre, 90–1 Finsen, Niels Ryberg, 52 Fitzgerald, Scott, 104 Forty, A., 89 Foucault, M., 33 Freeman, A., 29 Fripp, Sir Alfred, 46 Furedi, F., 28 Galton, F., 29 Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 86 Garden City Movement, 86–8 Gauvain, Henry, 57, 58, 61, 100 and British Medical Association, 63 and Hastings Popular Lecture, 60 and People’s League of Health, 67 and Royal Institute of British Architects, 91 Goodman, D., 93 Gorham, D., 31 Great Ormond Street Hospital, 43 habitus, 5, 108 Hall, L., 33 Hardy, A., 40 Hardy, C., 33, 35, 36, 83 Hastings Popular Lecture, 60 Hatcher, J., 50

Index Helfman, E., 6 helio-advocates, 106 helio-human, 9, 98, 92–3, 103–6, 108 helio-hygiene, 72, 74–5, 99, 106 heliosis, 9, 71, 92–3 and helio-structures, 93 heliotherapy, 9, 52, 97 and Hippocrates, 58 and historical origins, 58 and individualized treatment, 58–9, 61 and naturalistic healing, 58 and need for medical supervision, 52, 56, 61–2, 63 and overseas locations, 56 and popular interest, 62–4 and scientific basis of treatment, 54 and text books, 57 and treatment of children, 62 Heminway, Ernest, 104 Hess, Alfred, 47 heterogeneous relationality, 5 Hethrington, K., 7 Hill, Austin Bradford, 42n2 Hill, Leonard, 42, 60, 67, 78, 91 Hippocrates, 11, 58, 60, 70 Holding, Thomas Hiram, 35, 36 Hole, James, 84 House of Commons, 67 Howard, Ebenezer, 86, 87 Howarth, E., 103 hybrids, 92, 93, 107–8, 109 hygienic clothing, 79 ill health and pallor, 32 and working class, 29 Inge, William, 28, 79 interactive stabilization, 71 international modernist architecture, 94 Jasanoff, S., 107 Jeffrey, Julius, 12 Jones, G., 32, 33, 42, 66–8 Jordan, Alfred, 79, 100 Journal de Médecine de Paris, 101 Journal of State Medicine, 100 Journal of the American Medical Association, 45, 61 Juster, E., 101 Kemble, Fanny, 23 Kennedy, D., 12, 13, 14 King Edward VII Sanatoria, 89 König, 52

131

Kuh, D., 6 L’Oreal, 101 La Presse Médicale, 101 Lake, M., 28 Lancet, 16, 47, 54, 55, 56, 57 Lansbury, George, 100 and Lansbury’s Lido, 100n2 Lasch, C., 110 Lash, S., 98 Latham, Arthur, 89 Latour, B., 5, 6, 7, 8, 40, 55, 64, 92, 93, 108 Law, J., 8, 93, 106, 107 Lawrence, C., 65, 66, 69 Lawton, R., 84 Lee, N., 7 Lens, 72, 73, 74, see also Saleeby, Caleb Letchworth Garden City, 88 Lever, William Hesketh, 85 Leysin, 56, 57, 58, 74 lido, 93–5 liminality and medicine, 98 and zones of, 103 Lloyd George, David, 74 London Evening Standard, 31 London Zoo, 46, 68, 91 Loos, Adolf, 88n5 Lowe, J., 99 Lubetkin, Berthold, 91 Maiden Tribute episode, 31 masculinity, 17, 33, 34, 80 Masterman, C.E., 29 materiality, 5, 6 Matignon Accords, 102 Matthews, B., 30 Mauss, M., 7 Mawer, E., 5 medical holism, 66 and environment, 69 and hostility to laboratory practices, 69 Medical Research Committee, 40 Medical Research Council, 48, 97 and clinical trials of artificial sunlight treatment, 47–8 and research on London dock labourers, 41 and Special Report Series, 42, 47 medicine and attitudes to instrumentation and specialization, 65 and early twentieth century practice, 65

132

Index

and tourism, 98 Mediterranean coast and tourism, 103 Mellanby, Edward, 42, 47, 48, 97 Men’s Dress Reform Party, 78–81 and bathing costume reform, 100 Mendelsohn, Eric, 94 Menton, 23, 57 Michael, M., 2, 46, 80, 93, 109 Ministry of Health, 65 Mol, A., 7, 108 Montgomery, E., 52 Morning Post, 79 Morris, William, 36, 83, 87 Mort, F., 30 Moscucci, O., 77 Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire, 102n6 Mrozek, D., 36 Murray, A., 44n3 muscular Christianity, 33 Naegli, 50 natural childbirth movement, 77 nature and healing, 34, 51, 69 and moral danger, 33 Naylor, G., 36n3 neo-Hippocratism, 66, 70 Ness, A., 98n1 Nethersole, Olga, 67 New Health Society, 72–5, 84, 93 and establishment of, 68 and Men’s Dress Reform Party, 78–80 and resettlement of masses in rural areas, 68 New Statesman, 72, 74 Newton, Sir Charles, 22 Nonconformist Church, 86 Organic unity, 70 Ormiston-Cant, Laura, 31, 32 Osborn, F., 86 osteomalacia, 78 Otter, C., 76 paediatrics, 40 Pall Mall Gazette, 31 Palm,Theobald, 40, 41 Papworth Village Settlement, 89 Parker, Barry, 87–8, 107 pastoralism, 36 Paton, Noel, 41, 67, 78, 77, 107 Pearse, Innes, 90 Pearson, Charles, 28 Peckham Health Centre, 90–1

Pemble, J., 20, 21, 22, 25, 76n5 Pembrey, M., 17 People’s League of Health, 43, 72, 73, 107 and establishment of, 67 and First International Conference of, 63 and urban areas as unhealthy, 83 Phillippe, B., 102 physical activity and health, 34 Pickering, A., 71 Planck, Max, 42 Pliny, 43 pneumothorax, artificially induced, 50n3 Polidori, John, 32n2 Popenoe, P., 72n2 Port Sunlight, 85 Powell, William, 105 Power-Cobb, Frances, 20 Practitioner, 52 Priessnitzbund, 51 Prinsep, Henry, 22 Proctor, R., 51 prostitution, 31 proto-Internationalism, 88n5 Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act (1926), 74, 76 Public Health Act (1875), 85 Punch, 79 Purdah system, 78 racial characterization, 14 radioactivity, 60 Renbourn, E., 11, 16 Reybaud, F., 102 Reynolds-Ball, E.A., 57 rickets, 39 and causation, 40 and confinement, 41 and poverty, 41, 44 and sunlight, 40 risk factor, 6 Roelands, R., 52 Rogers, L., 110 Rollier, Auguste, 54, 57–9, 62, 63, 69, 74 Rosslyn-Earp, J., 61 Royal Institute of British Architects, 91–2 Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, 46 Ruskin, John, 22, 36, 87 Russo-Japanese war, 28 Saleeby, Caleb, 57, 67, 72, 72n1, 76, 79 and eugenics, 73 and post-natal care, 73 and ‘racial poisons’, 73

Index and smoke pollution, 73, 76 Salvation Army, 84 Sambon, Louis, 12 sanatoria, 50, 89 and decline of Swiss locations post WWI, 57 and excessive drinking, 56 and expenses for patients, 56 and nature discourse, 51 and Nordrach Regime, 53–4 and origins of, 51 and sunlight treatment, 51 Save the Children Fund, 44 Schocken Store, Stuttgart, 95 Schueller, Eugene, 102 and funding for extreme right wing political movements, 102n6 and racist and anti-Semitic views, 102n6 science and technology studies, 6, 106 Scout movement, 33, 83 and Scouting for Boys, 34 Seale, G., 73 Selby, P., 5 Serres, M., 64 Shields, R., 98, 99 Sickert, Richard, 79 Singleton, V., 7 Slix of Derby, 100 Smith, F., 50, 54, 57, 99 smog, 72n2 smoke pollution, 72, 73–7, 86 and smoke abatement, 67, 72, 75, 77, 106 see also Sunlight League and visual hygiene, 76 smoking and lung cancer, 42n2 Social Hygiene Movement, 32–3, 73, 66–8 and gender, 80 and motherhood, 80 Sociological Society, 73n3 sociotechnical entities and human/nonhuman, 71 solar topi (pith helmet), 12, 16 and racial difference, 16 and signifier of colonialism, 16 Solway, R., 29, 66 Sontag, S., 32, 50 Spencer Stanhope, Roddam, 22 St Pancras Clinic, 44 St Thomas’s Hospital, 44 Stafford, F., 99 Star, S., 49, 50 Stoddard, L., 29 Stoker, Bram, 32

133

Strathern, M., 25 sun cream, 6, 100–3 and adverts, 2, 102, 105 sun lamps, 6, 43, 44, 106 Sunday Times, 110 sunlight and architecture, 87 and ‘Aryans’, 13, 15 and bacteria, 54–5, 56 and the body, 22, 11, 97, 60 and camping, 35 and childbirth, 78 and danger, 56 and degeneracy, 14, 15 and deleterious effects of clothing, 22, 59 and eroticism, 23 and expert disagreement about risks, 4 and female beauty, 18 and garden cities, 86 and health in media, 2 and housing, 55 and hygiene, 41, 67 and identity, 25 and medical advice, 61, 100, 101, 110 and motherhood, 77 and nutrition, 41 and otherness, 25 and prophylactic treatments with, 60, 74 and protective clothing, 16 and radiation, 13 and risk, 3–4, 110 and smoke pollution, 73 and sociotechnical networks, 97 and therapy, 42 and tourism, 3, 109 and tropical medicine, 12, 14 and use as a tonic, 59, 61, 71 and Vitaglass, 68 and wellbeing, 5 Sunlight League, 72, 74, 99 and mixed bathing, 74, 77 and smoke abatement, 74, 76 and Sunlight: a Journal of Light and Truth, 74–5 Sunlight soap, 85 sunlight therapies and folding time, 64 sunshine philosophy and housing, 87 sunstroke, 12, 13, 16 suntan, 3–5, 18, 34, 101 and bodily perfection, 23 and competitions, 104 and film stars, 104

134

Index

and health, 62 and in-authenticity, 110 and links to the ancients, 25 and narcissistic identity performance, 110 and sensuous physicality, 23 and skin bleaching, 19 and unattractiveness, 18 Swanson, Gloria, 105 Symbolic role of sun, 6 Theatre Royal, 46 Thomas Cook, 20, 23n1 Times, 45, 62, 79, 92 and Special Sunlight and Health Edition, 63–4 Todd-White, J.G., 16 tourism, 3, 5, 12, 20, 89, 95, 97, 98–102, 105, 108 and health resorts, 56, 57, 63, 99 and the ‘Tourist Gaze’, 103 travel and consumption of ‘classical culture’, 21 and French Riviera, 21, 23, 55, 63, 102, 103–5 and health, 21 and pilgrimage, 20 and Victorian and Edwardian motivations, 20 Trélat, Emile, 55 tropical neurasthenia, 13–16 and masculine sexual dysfunction, 17–18 tuberculosis, 12, 39, 39, 49 and fictional representations, 49 and fragmentation, 49 and genetic susceptibility, 50n1 and incidence, 49–50 and literature, 49 and romanticization, 32 and streptomycin, 50 and treatments, 50, 51, 58 Unwin, Raymond, 87–8 urban/rural dichotomy, 83 urbanism and degeneration, 78

and depravity, 83 and growth of in nineteenth century, 84 and ill health, 33–4, 72, 83 and migration from the rural, 84 and tuberculosis, 51 Urquart, D.A., 100 Urry, J., 5, 98, 103 UV index, 4 Vaughan, Kathleen, 77–8 Veldes light treatment clinic, 52–3 vitamin D, 4, 40, 42–3, 47–8, 97, 110 vitamins, 40 Vogue, 2, 19 Walkowitz, J., 31 Walther, Otto, 53 Walton, J.K., 99 Walvin, J., 99 Ward, C., 33, 35, 36, 83 Warren, A., 33 Watts, George Frederic, 22–3 Weeks, J., 32 Weisz, G., 66, 69 Wells, H.G., 79 Welwyn Garden City, 88 West, William, 89 white crisis, 28–30 and body appearance, 30 and ‘white supremacy’, 28 and working classes, 29 Wilde, Oscar, 23 Williams, Owen, 90 Williams, Raymond, 83 Williams,Theodore, 54–5 Williamson, Scott, 90 Woman’s Weekly, 105 Wood, H.C., 13 Woodruff, Chas, 13–16, 25 World Health Organization, 4 Worpole, K., 88, 94, 95 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 36n3 Yates, N., 99 Ziegelroth, 52