Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1881-08-07
Sunlight at Home.

The value of sunlight as means OF
securing health should always be borne
in mind. DR.. B. r. Richardson, referring
to this subject, says:
Whether your home be large or small,
give it hight There is no house so likely
to be unhealthy as dark and gloomy
house; you can never see the dirt that
pollutes it. Dirt accumulates on dirt, and
the mind soon learns to apologize for this
condition because the gloom conceals it.
cit is no credit to be clean in this hole of
place." is soon the sort of idea the
housewife gets into her mind. "This
place is always dingy, do what you may"
is another similar and common idea; and
so in a dark house unwholesome things
get slowed away and forgotten, and the
air becomes impure, and when the air
becomes impure the digestive organs be-
come imperfect in action, and soon there
is some shade of bad health engendered
in those persons who live in that gloomy
house. Flowers do not health1ly bloom
in a dark house, and flowers are, as a
rule, good induces. We put the flowers
in our window that they may see the
light. Are not our children worth many
flowers? They are the choicest of flow
ers. Then again, light is necessary in
order that the animal spirits may be kept
refreshed and invigorated. No one is
truly happy who in waking hours is in
gloomy house or room The gloom of
the prison has ever been considered as a
part of the punishment of the prison, and
it is so. The mind is saddened in home
that ia not flushed with light, and when
the mind is saddened the whole physical
powers soon suffer. The heart beats
Ianguidly, the blood flows slowly, the
breathing is imperfect, the oxidation of
the blood is reduced, and the conditions
are laid for the development of many
wearisome and unnecessary constitution
al failures and sufferings.
Once again, light is of itself useful to
health in a direct manner Sunlight
favors nutrition; sunlight favors ner
vous function; sunlight sustains, chemic-
ally or physically, the healthy state of
the blood. Children and older persons
living in darkened places become pale
blanched; they have none of the ruddy,
healthy bloom of those who live in light.
We send a child that has lived in dark
court in London for a few days only in
the sunlight, and how marked is the
change! We hardly know the face
again.
Let us keep, then, this word in our
minds; light, beautiful light-sun-
light, which feeds us with Its influence,
and leaves no poisonous vapOrs in its
train. Before leave this subject want
to say word about light in relation to
the sick. A few hundred years ago it
became fashion, for reasons it was very
hard to divine, to place sick people in
dark and closely curtained bedrooms.
The practice to some extent is continued
to this day. When a person goes to bed
with sickness, it is often the first thing
to null down the blinds of the windows,
to set up dark blinds, or, if there be
Venetian blinds, to close them. On body
and spirit alike this practice is simply
pernicious. 1t may be well. if light IS
painful to the sufferer, to shield the eyes
from the light, or even shut the light
off them altogether; but for the sake of
this to shut it out of all the room, to cut
off wholesale its precious influence, to
make the sick-room dark cell in which
all kinds of impurities may be concealed
day after day, is an otfense to nature
which she rebukes in the sternest man.
ner.
This remark presses with special force
in cases where epidemic and contagious
diseases are the affections from which
the sufferers are suffering, for these
affections, as they live on uncleanliness,
REQUIRE for their suppression the broadcast
light of day. Moreover, l once found by
experiment that certain organic poisons,
analogous to the poisons which propa-
gate these diseases, are rendered innocu-
Gus by exposure to light. Thus, in every
point of view, light stands forward as
the agent of health. In sickness and in
health, in infancy, youth, middle age,
old age, in all seasons, for the mind and
for the welfare of the body, sunlight is .
bearer and sustainer of health.