By Dan Tortorice
Friends of Lake View Hill Park
During a recent stretch of cloudy days, I heard a doctor on the radio remind people to get enough vitamin D to help fight respiratory infections, including COVID-19. He suggested the lack of sunny days meant people should get vitamin D in their diets or consider taking a supplement.
The relationship of vitamin D and ultra-violet light had only recently been discovered when Lake View Hill Sanatorium put it to use treating tuberculosis (TB) patients beginning in 1930. That research took place at UW Madison just across Lake Mendota from the sanatorium’s Northside home in what is now Lake View Hill Park.
In the early years of the sanatorium. you would have seen patients in beds or wheelchairs out in the sun to absorb the healing effects of fresh air and sunshine. Some patients even spent nights sleeping on the porch and later talked of having fresh snow wiped off blankets in the morning.
We know now that doctors had created a vitamin D factory in the bodies of those patients. Just a few minutes of sunshine can provide a solid dose of a chemical that our livers turn into a powerful agent that boosts our immune systems and fights off ailments like cancer and heart disease. Their strengthened immune systems would have given TB patients a better chance of surviving.
I wonder if the doctors at Lake View consulted with researchers at UW. What we do know is those researchers went on to discover that vitamin D is created when regular foods, such as milk, are exposed to ultra-violet light. UW collaborated with our progressive government at that time to treat milk with ultra-violet light to fortify it with vitamin D to be sold to the public.
There is no way to know how many millions of lives were saved or improved by this collaboration of cutting-edge research and enlightened government over the many decades since then. But when we sit in the sunshine by the restored fountain in Lake View Hill County Park, we can look across at the UW campus and take pride in our progressive past.