num_pages: 216
description: In the second half of the nineteenth century American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks pollution obscured the skies and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed anxities about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the diseases of darkness especially rickets and tuberculosis.In American Sunshine  Daniel Freund tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century. Before long social reformers medical professionals scientists and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for Americas new dark age. Architects city planners and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health. and entrepreneurs dairymen and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context Freund sheds light on important questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes an original contribution to the histories of cities consumerism the environment and medicine.
language: English
title: American Sunshine: Diseases of Darkness and the Quest for Natural Light
publisher: University Of Chicago Press