No I think you’re looking at this wrong.

They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.

They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.

There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.

I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg.

I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.

> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.

I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.

Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History

That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on.

Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around.

At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change.

Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.

We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.

So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)

In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.

> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,

I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.

Everybody who's not been raised in a bubble knows the sun burns

It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"