Light showers History of a Health Technology, 1890-1960
In the interwar period, western health experts considered ultraviolet light a powerful means for stimulating the population. In Germany, the electrical industry started to sell sunlamps for daily use, while hy-gienists and the spokesmen of the health reform movement celebrated the health effects of "light showers" in the popular press. Based on a careful reading of a wide variety of scientific and popular texts, the book maps the functions of sunlight in western medicine and culture. It studies the history of light and heliotherapy in medicine and inves-tigates the transition of medical practices towards a marketed con-sumer product. The book argues that the electrification of light thera-py shaped a new rationale for the application of light on the human body in medicine and beyond at the start of the 20th century.
Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain's fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country, from c.1890–1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine's visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.
"This book reveals how, when, where and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Tauber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby; water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Mohology-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson's theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage's concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson's philosophies, Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship"--
A print copy is available for library use only at the Allen Memorial Library of the Cleveland Health Sciences Library at Case Western Reserve University. Includes Statistical report of City Hospital Sanatorium for 1926, p.25-28. Annual report for 1927, not published. Correspondence regarding the collection should be directed to the Allen Memorial Library Serials Dept. at crd@case.edu. ; Annual Reports of Public Health Collection, Cleveland, Ohio. 1875-1930
A print copy is available for library use only at the Allen Memorial Library of the Cleveland Health Sciences Library at Case Western Reserve University. Correspondence regarding the collection should be directed to the Allen Memorial Library Serials Dept. at crd@case.edu. ; Annual Reports of Public Health Collection, Cleveland, Ohio. 1875-1930
A print copy is available for library use only at the Allen Memorial Library of the Cleveland Health Sciences Library at Case Western Reserve University. Annual report for 1927, not published. Correspondence regarding the collection should be directed to the Allen Memorial Library Serials Dept. at crd@case.edu. ; Annual Reports of Public Health Collection, Cleveland, Ohio. 1875-1930