“‘More sun! More light! Is the cry of our desperate age,’ wrote a female correspondent in a German nudist magazine. . . .

The nudist’s belief in the therapeutic power of sunshine gained medical credibility during the 1920s as the Swiss doctors August Roller and Oskar Bernhard, working independently, proved the efficacy of the so-called sun cure (heliotherapy) on tuberculosis. . . . Roller’s clinic in Leysin, Switzerland . . . incorporated sun balconies where patients could lie in the sun (they took the sun when it was low in the sky rather than when it was at its strongest). . . .”

—Christopher Wilk, The Healthy Body Culture, from Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939, edited by Christopher Wilk, 2006.