CLINIC AT COLLIERY

Evening Star, Issue 19789, 13 February 1928, Page 13

CLINIC AT COLLIERY

A new era in industrial welfare work was inaugurated at Sherwood Colliery, Mansfield, when the first sunray clinic for miners was opened in the presence of a number of eminent medical men and others who are supervising this experiment for preventing disease in the industrial population (says the ‘Manchester Guardian’). The Duke, of York is interesting himself in the test, and has promised to visit the clinic, and it is hoped the miners’ welfare movement will take up the treatment elsewhere.

The clinic is situated in the pit yard, and its cost, excluding the installation of electric light, is £1,300. Lieutenant-colonel _ Hutchinson, of the New Health Society, who took five Sherwood colliery lads for a fortnight’s holiday in the Swiss .Alps, said that a clinic had been installed in a Birmingham factory, and 6d per treatment was charged, but the cost at Sherwood would work dut at only Id. Treatment at the Mansfield clinic is free to miners. Jn this instance power for the rays is obtained from the colliery’s electrical plant, and the rays are concentrated in the treatment-room upon a circle in which the patients walknaked. but wearing dark glasses. The installation consists of six mercury vapor lamps and four powerful radiant heat lamps. A large number of pit lads, in groups of eight, inaugurated the experiment of taking artificial sunlight for a period of a minute and a-half each, standing on chalk marks 40in from the mercury lamps. Standing nearer would result in burns. Leaving the room the lads entered an ablution chamber for hot or cold sprays, and dressed in an electrically-heated room. A small room is reserved for the treatment of children of miners and wound cases.

When the clinic is in full operation 800 men and boys per week will receive the rays. A test is to be conducted on 100, boys. Fifty of them will be subjected to artificial sunlight for six weeks, and their condition will be compared with that of fifty others who have not received treatment."'