The bell rings and all the children in the class leave in an orderly manner, heading for a larger room with the blinds drawn and rugs on the floor. They take off their uniform to stay in their underwear and put on tinted glasses and rubber bands designed to fix them on the head. They are arranged around a strange device, a kind of lamp. The same one the teacher approaches, dressed in a white gown and hat, and hits the power button.
We are in Murmansk Oblast, on the boreal coast of the Kola Peninsula, sometime in the 1980s, but “light baths” have been a common practice in the vast northern regions of Russia to promote the production of vitamin D. They continue to be. This is curious because in the European Union or the United States the usual clinical practice in the face of deficiencies of this vitamin is to supplement it. Neither children (infants or not), nor the elderly (to give two examples of groups with problems of this type) are initially recommended to use UV lamps. They are simply prescribed a few drops or a pill.
UV lamp “light baths” were given to Soviet kids in an attempt to supply them with vitamin D during the winter. (1987) from r / OldSchoolCool
What is this about? To the short duration of the summer in the Russian Far North as they say or is there something else? Today we have proposed go beyond the fascinating images of the “light baths” of the Soviet era and delve into the history of how a group of doctors, isolated from the international scientific community and with very particular circumstances, groped for the light in the middle of the darkness.
Deformed skeletons
The first sign is sometimes difficult to notice. The head, especially the posterior area, appears to dented when pressed, the fontanelles enlarge, and the long bones that support the weight of the body bend. Deformities in the tibiae, forearms, pelvis, wrists or knees begin. Growth stagnates, the body takes on odd shapes, and the chest becomes lumpy in the shape of a rosary. Those are the symptoms of a disease that has been accompanying us, at least, since we have medical records: rickets.
Lack of sunlight has many effects on the human body, but this disease (vitamin D deficiency) is one of the most terrible. So much so that, if we search the texts of Greek and Roman historians, it is not difficult to find clear descriptions of this ailment. It is also not difficult to find clues to its social impact either in the skeletal remains of the powerful Medici family or in art. While in 1509, without going any further. Hans Burgkmair the elder painted a baby Jesus with clear signs of suffering, a hundred years later Caravaggio finished a ‘Sleeping Cupid’ who also suffered from it. However, it was not until the year 1645 when rickets entered what we could already call ‘scientific literature’ with the publication of a treatise by David Whistler called “De morbo puerile anglorum” (“On the illness of English children” ).
By that time, rickets (or, as some already called it, the “English disease”) had a huge impact on the social, economic and intellectual life of the country. As we can imagine by And five years after Whistler’s work, a professor at the University of Cambridge, Francis Glisson went to the trouble of accumulating all the physical, clinical and anatomical evidence for the disease rather than getting tangled up in theoretical disquisitions. Yet children continued to die at a perfect confluence of smoke-shrouded cities, poor diets, and agrarian reforms that led to vast layers of society precariousness.
However, the ‘English disease’ should not mislead us. There is nothing – except perhaps the first symptoms of industrialization – that made rickets a British disease. In large areas of imperial Russia, by focusing on the subject that interests us, the problem affected half of the children. As early as the 19th century, while Scottish doctors concluded that rickets was related to environmental factors (such as deprivation of sunlight), Russian doctors related it to problems in housing conditions and practices. social. In Vilnius, where it affected one in three children, reports explained the higher prevalence of the disease in Jews by the greater reluctance of mothers to let their children play outdoors (compared to Gentiles).
How do we cure rickets?
Theories and proposals to combat the disease were emerging in clinical practice (in fact, the use of cod liver oil that we now know to be effective began to become popular as early as the 18th century), but it was not until 1918 that Edward Mellanby decided apply an experimental approach. At that time, rickets was especially strong in Scotland and, sensing a dietary cause, he decided to feed a group of caged dogs in laboratories a diet similar to that common among the Scots. A diet based on porridge (oatmeal porridge) ended up inducing rickets that could later be cured with cod oil and some sun exposure. The discovery of vitamin D, its role in disease, and the importance of the Sun in its production did the rest.
Above all, because this discovery It came at a time when the ‘movement of the sun’ was surprisingly popular across Europe and the United States. Although rickets is the natural result of two things (specific dietary deprivations and specific environmental restrictions), the medical community tended to divide between advocates of one and advocates of the other. And during those first decades of the twentieth century, imbued by strong technological optimism, light therapies experienced a true boom that far surpassed rickets and sought to use light for all kinds of ailments and diseases.
Children receiving ultraviolet light treatment at London’s Institute of Ray Therapy (1934) from r / interestingas___
It was a short boom, yes. And not because light did not play an important role in many ailments (Huldschinsky, in the middle of the World War and with thousands of German children suffering from symptoms, had already shown that rickets could be treated successfully with ultraviolet lamps), but because the expectations that were generated were huge. Too big. In 1927, Dora Colebrook did an extensive study for most health problems in which light was usually prescribed and found no notable effect in the vast majority. That marked, in one way or another, the decline of light in clinical practice.
The bright Soviet approach
A decline that, and this is very interesting, did not reach the Soviet Union. As Charlotte Kühlbrandt and Martin McKee tell us, examining the number of studies published on the subject in the USSR and in the rest of the world, it can be seen that between the late 1920s and early 1960s Soviet doctors published between four and eight times more work on this type of therapeutic approach. In the Soviet Union, light remained extremely popular for decades and as far as we know it still is today in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics.
Why? Why this bifurcation between Soviet and Western medicine? The truth is that as soon as we start to investigate we discover that “light therapies” add up to various factors that favored its “political, economic and social compatibility” with the practices and dynamics of Soviet science from the first half of the 20th century. Let’s start with the first compatibility, politics. During the 30s of the 20th century, the high command of many university and research institutions made a very important effort in order to build a “new Soviet science”. The best known case is that of Lysenko and his rejection of Darwinism and genetics, but there were many more situations in which entire lines of research lived and died only in relation to their adaptation to dialectical materialism.
Electricity played a central role in the ideological imaginary of the USSR. To the point that in 1920 Lenin himself declared that famous phrase that “communism is soviets plus electricity.” The importance of light for health was also presented as a scientific discovery of purely proletarian origin: it would have been the factory workers themselves who would have realized its role in physical, psychological and social health and would have done so. notified to the authorities. Light therapies fit like a glove with the ‘zeitgeist’ of those years.
Russian children gather around a UV light during the sunlight-deprived Siberian winter months from r / ANormalDayInRussia
They also fitted in with the preventive orientation that Soviet officials wanted to impart to their still developing health system. “The fundamental and main characteristic of Soviet public health, which differentiates it from medicine in capitalist countries, is its preventive orientation,” they said in Moscow in 1952. That is, although the relative international isolation of medical researchers prevented them keep up to date with many of the scientific advances, it is also true that, even when these advances were known, for decades the Soviet commanders tried to create an alternative model that “having deep roots in Russian medicine” (people like Sechenov or Pavlov) “will carry out effective preventive operations with the aim of reducing morbidity and eliminating its causes.”
Finally, another key factor was the country’s industrial limitations. And this is something that is little thought about because the image of the USSR as an industrial power makes us forget that this is not true for all industries. While Europe (with Germany in the lead) AND the US had a very powerful pharmaceutical industry that “processed” medical problems to find pharmacological solutions; Russia lacked such capacity and instead had a formidable infrastructure dedicated to heavy industrial and military production. That made the Soviets “process” medical problems differently, with other tools and that solutions were sought where they were strongest: in industrial manufacturingsuch as ultraviolet lamps.
From the Soviet past to today’s Russia
All this, although it may seem strange, explains much of the popularity of ‘light baths’ in contemporary Russia. All health systems have peculiarities attributable to what economists call “path dependence”; In other words, the decisions we make condition the rest of the decisions we will make in the future. The preeminence of this type of therapy for decades has contributed to creating a widely spread social prestige.
And all this despite the fact that the evidence on its validity remains scarce. On the one hand, although data on the real extent of rickets in Russia in recent decades have been scarce, by some indicators we know that especially the extreme north (and the Central Asian republics) had serious problems with vitamin D as late as the decade of the 80s, when rickets was already more than controlled in the western world. On the other hand, the Russian academy has continued to publish works favorable to this type of intervention in numerous diseases, but its quality is very low. There are authors who have come to suggest that light therapies are the Russian equivalent of acupuncture (a technique that only finds positive results when studied in China).
Why is it still being done? In part, because it works for some dermatological conditions (from psoriasis to fungal mycoses), it plays an important role in the production of vitamin D and has some documented effects on moods. Even more so in regions with very little exposure to sunlight. Nevertheless, the main reason why it continues to be done is by tradition. So much so that if we start dating the photographs of children undergoing this type of bath, we can see that their number is declining over time.
Picture | Michael Neubert
