Theobald Palm and His Remarkable Observation How the Sunshine Vitamin Came to Be Recognized 英文参考文献.docVIP

Nutrients 2012, 4, 42-51; doi:10.3390/nu4010042 OPEN ACCESS nutrients ISSN 2072-6643 /journal/nutrients Review Theobald Palm and His Remarkable Observation: How the Sunshine Vitamin Came to Be Recognized Russell W. Chesney The Department of Pediatrics, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, Children’s Foundation Research Center, The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN 38103, USA; E-Mail: rchesney@; Tel.: +1-901-287-6106; Fax: +1-901-287-5028 Received: 3 November 2011; in revised form: 4 January 2012 / Accepted: 11 January 2012 / Published: 17 January 2012 Abstract: The seminal discovery that sunlight was important in the prevention of nutritional rickets was made in 1890 by Theobald A. Palm, a medical missionary who contrasted the prevalence of rickets in northern European urban areas with similar areas in Japan and other tropical countries. He surmised that exposure to sunlight prevented rickets. Over the next 40 years his observation led to an understanding of ultraviolet irradiation and its role in vitamin D synthesis. This opened a new era of appreciation for the curative powers of the sun and “the sunshine vitamin”. While Palm’s observations were in some ways obscure, they had a potent effect on the development of photobiology. Keywords: vitamin D; nutritional rickets; photobiology; sunlight; UVB wavelength rays 1. Introduction The prototypic disorder of vitamin D-deficiency in growing children is rickets. In nearly epidemic proportions in the west and south of England in the early 1600s, rickets (known as “the English disease”) was soon evident in numerous parts of northern Europe and North America [1–3]. Because its prevalence was as high as 60–80% in children living in poverty, many early pediatricians sought its cause. Theories of its etiology included an infectious cause, a congenital condition, the result of confinement, or bowel flora autocontamina