Rowan Jacobsen
speaker
1,919 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Jul 2022
last heard 26 Jun
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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And I spent quite a bit of time going through the archives and the records.
And it is fascinating how 100 plus years ago, the medical establishment was in complete agreement that sunlight was one of the foundations of health.
And one of the best things you could do for yourself was to make sure you got sunlight
As you say, in hospitals, they would wheel patients out on the roof or onto decks to make sure they got regular sunlight.
Kids, there was a big push to make sure kids got sunlight.
And that really came from the discovery in the early, early part of the 20th century that two really important diseases happened.
could be cured or at least treated via sunlight.
One was rickets, which is a disease where your bones in childhood never get hard enough.
So you have soft bones as a baby, and that can mean that your legs are bowed or even that your skull never settles into its normal shape.
And that's caused from a lack of vitamin D because vitamin D helps to mineralize your bones.
And so that was directly related to sunlight.
And they figured out early 1900s that just like putting kids in the sunlight would cure rickets.
And kind of at the same time, they also realized that tuberculosis, which was the scourge of 19th century Europe and the U.S., it comes in two different forms.
One is pulmonary.
It gets into your lungs.
And that's sort of the classic consumption of romantic poets like John Keats.
But then it also can be on your skin.
And it's a bacterium that will just eat your skin.
And that was also deadly.
And that turned out to be very susceptible to sunlight.
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