ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, disease was the primary fear in urban centers. Tuberculosis and rickets mysteriously savaged the populations of cities, particularly the young and the elderly. Disease enfeebled both the military and economic might of the British Empire. During the Boer War, 40 percent of British draftees were deemed unfit to serve. At the outbreak of the First World War, the situation was much the same with over a third deemed unfit to serve. Although the microbial agent responsible for tuberculosis had been known since the latter nineteenth century, little was available in the way of treatment, other than to prescribe bedrest and let nature take its course. The cause of rickets, on the other hand, remained a mystery until 1919, when Edward Mellanby identified it as a vitamin D deficiency. Casimir Funk had coined the term vitamines, or vital amines, in researching beri-beri in 1912. In 1927, Otto Rosenheim and Thomas Webster found that the body produced vitamin D when exposed to sunlight. In parallel, Nobel laureate Niels Finsen made the startling discovery that tuberculosis could be treated by nothing more than plentiful sunlight.
