Rickets

President Clarence C. Little of the University of Maine and Dr. W. T. Bovie, Professor of Biophysics at Harvard Medical School, have discovered a cure for rickets. The cure consists of a violet ray treatment, wherein the subject is exposed to ultraviolet rays projected by a Cooper-Hewitt lamp through a fused quartz window. Chickens--a kind of fowl peculiarly susceptible to rickets--have been experimented upon with a success which definitely establishes the cure.

Said Dr. Bovie: "The importance of these experiments would be very great even if they applied only to the raising of chickens. Applicable to this, they are also applicable to the raising of children. Rickets, a disease of calcium metabolism, is found in marked or minor form in 97 out of every 100 city babies--babies who are kept indoors in the winter. In the spring, they are thin, lumpy, febrile. They have rickets."

Rickets is a medical term for poverty--poverty of the bones. When the virtuous salts, retrieved by the body's chemistry from fruits and greens, course more slowly through the blood because of the languor of the heart in winter and the lack of sunlight, or are not present at all because fruits and greens have not been eaten, the bones are pinched with poverty. To make up for this, they swagger and falsely swell, while the sufferer falls off in flesh. The head becomes bulky; the barrel of the ribs warped; the sternum projects. Fever, sweating, temper, sensitiveness-- that is rickets. In former days, a famed antidote, a preventative, was known. That stood and stands still on many a pantry shelf, is administered in a great spoon after every meal, a green-glooming fluid in a sticky bottle--Cod-liver Oil. This ob- noxious tonic possesses many of the vitamins necessary to discourage rickets, gives strength to rickety children.

Chickens. Subjected to ordinary sunlight, chickens prospered; left in the dark, they developed rickets and died. Exposed to rays from the quartz window, they grew faster than normally ; their bones became very stout, sometimes so stout that their growth was a positive menace. In a few weeks, by continued use of the rays, it was found possible to develop fabulously succulent small fowls--"superbroilers." When the milk and celery which fed them had been treated with the rays, they thrived better than those whose food had not been so treated.

The Significance. The treatment has not as yet been used on rickety (Continued on Page 20) children; but preparations have been made for so doing. In the solarium at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, a large window of fused quartz has been installed for use in child cases; and similar work is going on elsewhere. This quartz is, however, expensive. Until facilities are greatly expanded, the treatment must remain what it is--a cure for a limited number, not a widespread means of promoting the general health of children, stimulating growth and obviating the bone-troubles of the race. So used, it might be possible to develop a race of supermen, immune to rickets, rheumatism and bowlegs. At the present time, the most practical application of the discovery is the production of superbroilers.

Elsewhere. Scientific investigators elsewhere, dealing with the problem of rickets, have made further discoveries as to the value of various curative oils. At the University of Wisconsin, it was found that fats other than cod-liver oil, which are ordinarily of no avail in affecting the disease, possess curative properties after they have been subjected to ultraviolet rays. In Manhattan, one Alfred F. Hess and other researchers noted that the potency of cod-liver oil to prevent rickets is greatly increased after the oil has undergone radiation.