Rowan Jacobsen
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Rowan Jacobsen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That would have been a strange notion to most peoples throughout history, but especially this era, the heliotherapy era, which started in the early 1900s in both Europe and the U.S., and was really a reaction to two diseases that were rampant, tuberculosis and rickets.
And both those diseases can be treated with sunlight.
Rickets is a lack of vitamin D, and vitamin D is produced in the skin with the help of sunlight.
And one of the things that vitamin D does is it helps to get calcium into your bones, so your bones get hard.
Kids in the Industrial Revolution who were never seeing the sun had almost no vitamin D in their bodies, and they were all getting rickets, so they had soft bones.
It's a really bad disease.
Even bigger was tuberculosis, which, you know, back in the 1800s was responsible for like one out of every four deaths in Europe and parts of the US.
And it can be a pulmonary kind that infects your lungs.
And that's kind of like the classic consumption that we think of as, you know, like John Keats dying of consumption.
But it can also infect the skin.
It's like this flesh eating bacteria, basically.
Oh, God.
But that one can be fixed by sunlight.
Wow.
Once scientists figured out that both rickets and tuberculosis could be solved by light, they didn't quite understand why at the time, but they're kind of like, maybe light's good for other stuff too.
And it actually, it got a little out of hand where they started believing that light was probably good for everything.
So, you know, we're familiar with this whole sanitarium era where people would go up to the sanitariums in the Alps to take the fresh air and
Exactly.
The outdoor cure.
First it was the Alps, and then California was advertising itself as early as like 1870 as the sanitarium to the world, right?
Showing 21–40 of 216 · page 2 of 11
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