It is received wisdom that Coco Chanel accidentally invented the suntan on a yachting jaunt back in the early 1920s. Like flapper dresses, bobbed hair and automobiles, the suntan seems iconic of the new freedoms of the epoch when the Victorian age was finally put to rest, and the bright young things danced a Charleston on its grave.

Medicine is also ready to blame fashion for inventing and sustaining what it now condemns as vain, frivolous and above all dangerous. A UK cancer charity website sets out to debunk various ‘Tanning Myths’, including that: ‘Being tanned is a sign of health’. ‘False’, it bluntly declares, but fails to enquire into the origins of this misguided belief. To do so would reveal the Coco legend to be the classic urban myth it is, but would uncover a far more interesting story. ‘Cover Up’ is the public health headline how we should respond to the sun. The true history of the tan reveals just how ironic that headline is.

If Coco isn’t the founder of the modern cult of sun-worship, then this distinction might well fall to John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), of Corn Flake and The Road to Wellville fame. Kellogg has come down to us as a prime Victorian humbug, supposedly embodying the repressions of that age as much as Coco does the freedoms of the one that vanquished it. Yet, Kellogg was a renowned surgeon, an early advocate of holistic medicine, and the inventor of not just Corn Flakes and Peanut Butter, but the electric blanket and the sun bed.

Kellogg’s first ‘Incandescent Light Bath’ was constructed in 1891, and became celebrated soon after. Kaiser Whilhelm, and King Edward VII of Great Britain reputedly used or owned them, the latter installing them in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle to relieve his gout. ... Kellogg was up-to-the-minute with developments in the emergent disciplines of helio and phototherapy. The undisputed pioneer in this field was the Danish physician Niels R. Finsen, who’s Institute of Phototherapy in Copenhagen , Kellogg first visited in 1899. Finsen Lights were installed in the London Hospital in Whitechapel in 1900, the bequest of Queen Alexandra (the Danish wife of the light-bath owning monarch), and in 1903 Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize for his use of ultra-violet light to cure lupus vulgaris (tuberculosis of the skin).

Whilst it was the surgical and localised application of the so-called ‘chemical’ rays (UV) for chronic disorders that made the news and won Finsen the Prize, it was the more general and hygienic application of sunlight that most interested Kellogg. He remarked how better results were achieved outdoors in summer at Finsen’s Institute, than when patients were treated inside with arc lights. He concluded that ‘the difference is probably due to the tonic effects of the general exposure to the sun’. Kellogg was a firm believer in these ‘tonic’ properties, and prescribed sun baths broadly as part of his holistic health regime at his Battle Creek Sanitarium. Kellogg describes these in 1902:

The sun-bath is best administered in an outdoor gymnasium, provided with suitable couches, a sand bank, and other appliances. Several patients of the same sex may be treated at once in such an inclosure, the demands of modesty being satisfied by the scantiest of bathing attire. Male patients commonly wear very small trunks, jock-bands, or narrow loin-cloths….

Kellogg claims that sun baths were being ‘systematically employed … under medical supervision at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the year 1876’ (Kellogg, Light Therapeutics, 1910). As such we might consider Kellogg as one of the true founders of the new cult of the sun. For his emphasis on the general and hygienic applications of sunlight is characteristic of the way sunbathing developed in the early years of the new century, evolving first into a lifestyle cult and eventually into a fashion.

[Adapted from an article published in History Today July 2008 based on the 'Health' chapter of Sunshine. The article and chapter go on to explain how public health authorities actively encouraged us to sunbathe back in the 1920s and 30s, and how the fashionable were actually the last people to get into sunbathing. The first sun-tanned face did not appear in Vogue until 1926, 50 years after Kellogg's first experiments in therapeutic tanning.The Kellogg images are kindly provided by TheLifestyleLaboratory, the custodians of Kellogg's archive, scientific artefacts, including his sunbeds, and his memory at Battle Creek]

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