For millennia, people had one apparent and dependable supply of sunshine – the Solar – and we knew the Solar was important for our survival.
This may be why historic religions – akin to these in Egypt, Greece, the Center East, India, Asia, and Central and South America – concerned Solar worship.
Early religions have been additionally usually tied up with therapeutic. Sick individuals would flip to the shaman, priest or priestess for assist.
Whereas historic peoples used the Solar to heal, this won’t be the way you assume.
Since then, we have used gentle to heal in plenty of methods. Some you would possibly recognise in the present day, others sound extra like magic.
From warming ointments to sunbaking
There’s not a lot proof round in the present day that historic peoples believed daylight itself might remedy sickness. As a substitute, there’s extra proof they used the heat of the Solar to heal.
The Ebers Papyrus is an historic Egyptian medical scroll from round 1500 BCE. It incorporates a recipe for an ointment to “make the sinews […] versatile“.
The ointment was made from wine, onion, soot, fruit and the tree extracts frankincense and myrrh. As soon as it was utilized, the individual was “put in daylight”.
Different recipes, to deal with coughs for instance, concerned placing substances in a vessel and letting it stand in daylight. That is presumably to heat it up and assist it infuse extra strongly. The identical method is within the medical writings attributed to Greek doctor Hippocrates who lived round 450-380 BCE.
The doctor Aretaeus, who was lively round 150 CE in what’s now fashionable Turkey, wrote that daylight might remedy continual circumstances of what he referred to as “lethargy” however we would recognise in the present day as despair:
Lethargics are to be laid within the gentle, and uncovered to the rays of the Solar (for the illness is gloom); and in a moderately heat place, for the trigger is a congelation of the innate warmth.
Classical Islamic scholar Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE) described the well being results of sunbathing (at a time after we did not know in regards to the hyperlink to pores and skin most cancers).
In E-book I of The Canon of Drugs he stated the recent Solar helped every little thing from flatulence and bronchial asthma to hysteria. He additionally stated the Solar “invigorates the mind” and is useful for “clearing the uterus”.
It was generally laborious to inform science from magic
All of the methods of curing described to date rely extra on the Solar’s warmth moderately than its gentle. However what about curing with gentle itself?
English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) knew you may “cut up” daylight right into a rainbow spectrum of colors.
This and plenty of different discoveries radically modified concepts about therapeutic within the subsequent 200 years.
However as new concepts flourished, it was generally laborious to inform science from magic.
For instance, German mystic and visionary Jakob Lorber (1800-1864) believed daylight was the very best remedy for just about something. His 1851 e book The Therapeutic Energy of Daylight was nonetheless in print in 1997.
Public well being reformer Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) additionally believed within the energy of daylight. In her well-known e book Notes on Nursing, she stated of her sufferers:
second solely to their want of recent air is their want for gentle […] not solely gentle however direct daylight.
Nightingale additionally believed daylight was the pure enemy of micro organism and viruses. She appears a minimum of partially proper. Daylight can kill some, however not all, micro organism and viruses.
Chromotherapy – a method of therapeutic based mostly on colors and lightweight – emerged on this interval. Whereas a few of its supporters declare utilizing colored gentle for therapeutic dates again to historic Egypt, it is laborious to seek out proof of this now.
Trendy chromotherapy owes lots to the fertile thoughts of doctor Edwin Babbitt (1828-1905) from the US. Babbitt’s 1878 e book The Ideas of Gentle and Shade was based mostly on experiments with colored gentle and his personal visions and clairvoyant insights. It is nonetheless in print.
Babbitt invented a conveyable stained-glass window referred to as the Chromolume, designed to revive the stability of the physique’s pure colored power. Sitting for set intervals underneath the colored lights from the window was stated to revive your well being.
Indian entrepreneur Dinshah Ghadiali (1873-1966) examine this, moved to the US and invented his personal instrument, the Spectro-Chrome, in 1920.
The speculation behind the Spectro-Chrome was that the human physique was made up of 4 parts – oxygen (blue), hydrogen (purple), nitrogen (inexperienced) and carbon (yellow). When these colors have been out of stability, it brought on illness.
Some hour-long periods with the Spectro-Chrome would restore stability and well being. By utilizing its inexperienced gentle, for instance, you may reportedly support your pituitary gland, whereas yellow gentle helped your digestion.
By 1946 Ghadiali had made round one million {dollars} from gross sales of this gadget within the US.
And in the present day?
Whereas a few of these therapies sound weird, we now know sure colored lights deal with some sicknesses and problems.
Phototherapy with blue gentle is used to deal with new child infants with jaundice in hospital. Folks with seasonal affective dysfunction (generally generally known as winter despair) will be handled with common publicity to white or blue gentle. And ultraviolet gentle is used to deal with pores and skin circumstances, akin to psoriasis.
At the moment, gentle remedy has even discovered its method into the magnificence trade. LED face masks, with superstar endorsements, promise to battle zits and cut back indicators of ageing.
However like all types of gentle, publicity to it has each dangers and advantages. Within the case of those LED face masks, they may disrupt your sleep.
That is the ultimate article in our ‘Gentle and well being’ sequence, the place we take a look at how gentle impacts our bodily and psychological well being in generally shocking methods. Learn different articles within the sequence.
Philippa Martyr, Lecturer, Pharmacology, Ladies’s Well being, College of Biomedical Sciences, The College of Western Australia
This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the authentic article.
