For millennia, humans have had one obvious and reliable source of light – the Sun – and we’ve got known that the Sun is crucial to our survival.
Perhaps for this reason ancient religions – resembling those in Egypt, Greece, Middle East, India, AsiaAND Central AND South America – concerned the cult of the Sun.
Enthusiast of neoclassicism/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA
Early religions were also common related to healing. Sick people turned to a shaman, priest or priestess for help.
Although ancient people used the Sun for healing, it might not be what you’re thinking that.
Since then, we’ve got used light for healing in some ways. Some of them chances are you’ll recognize today, others sound more like magic.
From warming ointments to tanning
Currently, there’s little evidence that ancient people believed that sunlight could cure disease. Instead, there’s more evidence that they used the Sun for healing.
Wellcome Collection
The Ebers Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical scroll created around 1500 BC. It accommodates a recipe for an ointment for “they make the tendons (…) flexible“. The ointment was constructed from wine, onions, soot, fruit and wood extracts, frankincense and myrrh. After application, the person was “exposed to sunlight.”
Other recipes, for instance for cough, involved putting the ingredients right into a container and leaving it within the sun. This might be to warm up the drink and permit it to brew stronger. Same technique occurs in medical writings attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates, who lived around 450-380 BC
It was written by the physician Aretheus, who worked around 150 AD in what’s now Turkey sunlight could heal chronic cases of what he called “lethargy”, but today we might recognize depression:
The classical Islamic scholar Ibn Sina (980-1037 AD) described the health effects of tanning (at a time once we didn’t know of the link to skin cancer). In Book I Canon of medicine he said the new sun helps with all the pieces from flatulence and asthma to hysteria. He also said that the sun “refreshes the brain” and has a helpful effect on “cleansing the uterus.”
Sometimes it was hard to inform science from magic
All hardening methods described to this point depend more on the sun’s heat than on its light. What about light-only curing?
Merkur Pub Co/Biblio
The English scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) knew that sunlight could possibly be “split” into rainbow spectrum of colours.
This and lots of other discoveries radically modified ideas about healing over the subsequent 200 years.
But sometimes it was hard to inform when latest ideas got here up learning from magic.
For example, the German mystic and visionary Jakob Lorber (1800-1864) believed that sunlight was one of the best cure for nearly all the pieces. His 1851 book “The Healing Power of Sunlight” read: still in print in 1997.
Public health reformer Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) he also believed in the facility of sunlight. In his famous book Notes on Nursingshe said about her patients:
second only to the necessity for fresh air is the necessity for light (…) not only light, but in addition direct sunlight.
Nightingale also believed that sunlight was the natural enemy of bacteria and viruses. It seems at the least partially right. Sunlight can kill some, but not all, bacteria and viruses.
Chromotherapy – a treatment method based on colours and light – appeared during this era. Some proponents claim that the origins of using coloured light for healing date back to ca ancient Egyptit’s hard to search out evidence of this now.
Getty Research Institute/Internet Archive Book Images/Flickr
Modern chromotherapy owes much to the fertile mind of Edwin Babbitt (1828-1905) from the United States. Babbitt’s 1878 book Principles of light and color he was based on experiments with coloured light and on his own visions and clairvoyant observations. It’s still in print.
Babbitt invented a conveyable stained glass window called Chromolumaimed toward restoring the balance of the body’s natural coloured energy. It is claimed that sitting under coloured light from a window for a certain period of time restores health.
Daderot/Wikimedia Commons
Indian entrepreneur Dinshah Ghadiali (1873-1966) examine it, moved to the United States and invented his own instrument, the so-called Spectro-Chromein 1920.
The theory behind Spectro-Chrome was that the human body was composed of 4 elements – oxygen (blue), hydrogen (red), nitrogen (green), and carbon (yellow). When were these colours? imbalanceit caused the disease.
A couple of hour-long sessions with Spectro-Chrome could be enough restore balance and health. For example, through the use of green light, you’ll be able to supposedly help your pituitary gland, while yellow light helps with digestion.
By 1946, Ghadiali had created about one million dollars from sales of this device within the USA.
And today?
While some of these treatments sound strange, we already know that certain coloured lights treat certain diseases and disorders.
Blue light phototherapy it’s utilized in the hospital treatment of newborns with jaundice. People affected by seasonal affective disorder (sometimes called winter depression) may be treated by often exposing themselves to this medicine white or blue light. And ultraviolet light is used to treat skin diseases, resembling psoriasis.
Nowadays, light therapy is even utilized in the cosmetics industry. LED masks with star inscriptions, promise to fight pimples and reduce the signs of aging.
However, as with all forms of light, exposure to it comes with each risks and advantages. In the case of these LED face masks, they might disturb your sleep.
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