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Show Health and Beauty By DR. SOPHIA BRUNSON the bones of the little patients" were well. They, too, became full of pranks and mischief. The X-rays X-rays showed that the bones were healed. Now it became known that cod liver oil and sunlight were a specific cure for rickets. Yet the question was raised which one was curing rickets. English ladies were sent to Germany Ger-many to find Out. They divided their patients into three sections. All had bad cases of rickets. One group received cod liver oil. One was exposed to sunlight or sun lamps. The third received no treatment at all. The patients who were treated with cod liver oil and sunlight got well. Those who had neither remained sick. In fact the rickets made more serious inroads in-roads than before. It was now clear that fish oil and sunlight would cure rickets. But how? The fish swam in water on which" the sunlight had poured its rays. Their livers stored up the sunlight which children received second hand from the oil that was . pressed from fish livers. Next, the scientists discovered that they could enrich milk and I almost any kind of food by treat- I ing it with ultra-violet light which caused the vitamin D to form in it. This process was called call-ed irradiation. i ! mi ni ir FT T ri i NUTRITION , No. Nine McCollum and Miss Simmonds worked until they found that super-heated cod liver oil would not cure sore eyes because the heat destroyed the vitamin A contained in the oil. They reasoned that another property which they named nam-ed vitamin D, was the principle which cured rickets. They made numerous experiment on puppies before they turned their attention to the great numbers of poor, afflicted af-flicted children lying in the hospital hos-pital with deformed bodies and soft bones and teeth. Finally in 1922 they announced, "We have detected in codliver oil the presence of an unidentified substance which prevents and cures rickets. For the present we are naming it vitamin D." This was one of the greatest discoveries discov-eries of the 20th century. But there was a man in Germa ny, Dr. Huldschiensky, who said, "No, cod liver oil does not cure rickets, but sunlight does." This doctor had actually cured many cases of rickets by exposure to sunlight. The doctors had observed for many generations that in foggy, northern climates where there was but little sunlight rickets were a common and devastating disease. On the other hand, rickets seldom appeared in the tropics where the natives were very scantily clad and the children not at all. In 1919 Dr. Huldschiensky could not send rickety patients to sun-, ny climates. He practiced medicine medi-cine in Berlin, where the people could not even buy codliver oil, so he bought ultra-violet lamps or sun lamps and placed four of the sickest patients under them. And twice a day they were exposed, front and back, to the rays. Their bodies tanned and in two months |