by Lydia Kang
From New York City to San Francisco, homeowners began adding sunrooms built with blue glass or, at the very least, a few blue windowpanes here and there. Hydropathic institutes also caved to public demand for blue light and began constructing blue light sunrooms. The trend soon spread to Europe, where “light baths” became very popular in England, and French opticians began to manufacture blue eyeglasses. In 1877, a journalist for Scientific American wrote:
It is now quite common along our streets and avenues to see frames of azure crystals hanging within dwelling house windows; while, on sunny days, the invalid grandfather or other patient may be noticed basking in the ethereal rays, his countenance filled with hope, though streaked with blue.
That same article, however, was also the beginning of the end for the blue light fad. It was the first in a series produced by the magazine debunking the craze for being exactly—and only—that: a craze. Scientific American came out punching, announcing the scientific reality that lounging underneath blue glass actually exposed you to less blue light, not more. If you really wanted to soak up blue rays, you were better off standing outside or, at the very least, beneath clear glass. Really all Pleasanton had been doing—and all that anyone else had been doing, for that matter—was slightly shading sunlight. A week after that damning piece, Scientific American struck again, proclaiming that the supposed cures generated by blue light were a combination of the well-studied health benefits of a brief sunbath and a pronounced placebo effect.
Despite attempted rebuttals from Pleasanton, the end was nigh. By 1878, the general public had moved on, and the blue glass craze faded away just as quickly as it had sprung up. Although the obsession with blue light had died down, the process of using light to heal did not disappear as quickly. Medical quacks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued with variations on a general “light as healer” theme.
Artificial Sun: Light Therapy Moves Indoors
In 1879, Thomas Edison first demonstrated his version of the incandescent lightbulb. Although Edison was not the first person to invent a lightbulb, he was the first to invent one that was commercially viable, could be produced cheaply, and had a long lifetime—twelve hundred hours. Edison didn’t stop there. He went on to develop an electrical grid system, demonstrating how electricity could enlighten an entire community from a central generator wired to each home. He even created the first electric meter to measure use. By the time he was done, Edison said, “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
Edison’s groundbreaking work paved the way for physicians to experiment with the impact of concentrated light on disease. Some legitimate uses of light therapy were subsequently developed, particularly by Niels Ryberg Finsen, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1903 for demonstrating the susceptibility of lupus to concentrated light radiation.
But quacks were quick to get in on the action, too.
In the late 1890s, John Harvey Kellogg invented “light baths” (in addition to breakfast cereal) for use at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. From an 1893 newspaper article:
The necessary parts are a cabinet that encloses the entire body except the head, and fifty electric lamps of sixteen-candle power or 110 volts. They are arranged about the body in groups, with a separate switch for each group, so they can be directed at a particular part of the body. The light makes the patient frisky, and browns the skin like an ocean bath.
Basically, using the bath was like sitting in a sauna with really harsh lighting. Kellogg believed that light baths could cure typhoid, scarlet fever, and diabetes, and could help treat obesity, scurvy, and constipation. In 1910’s Light Therapeutics: A Practical Manual of Phototherapy for the Student and the Practitioner, he wrote of the benefits of the light bath:
The electric-light bath prolonged to the extent of producing vigorous perspiration should be employed two or three times a week… . Tanning the whole surface of the body by means of the arc light will be an excellent means of improving the patient’s general vital condition.
“Very short applications over the heart are useful in cases of collapse under anesthesia, opium poisoning, and in cases of heart failure.” (From Light Therapeutics’ section on shining an arc light over your chest.)
In other words, Kellogg stumbled upon the health benefits of sweating. He claimed that his light baths had been adopted by several of the “crowned heads and titled families of Europe” after King Edward of England was apparently cured of his gout by taking a series of light baths in Hamburg. Edward, we are assured by Kellogg, subsequently had a light bath installed at Windsor and Buckingham. So now you’ve got your question for the tour guide next time you visit either palace.
Nudity allowed in the light box.
No Diagnosis, No Drugs, No Problem?
Dinshah P. Ghadiali was a stage manager in Bombay, India, when he first read about color therapy. Inspired, he leapt to the aid of a friend’s niece—who was suffering from mucous colitis—with nothing more than a purple pickle bottle, a kerosene lamp, and some milk in a blue glass container. After she was “cured,” Ghadiali knew he’d found his calling and emigrated to the United States in 1911 to spread the color-therapy gospel—and make a pretty penny while he was at it.
Ghadiali blended elements of lightbulb therapy and the blue glass trend to create what he called the Spectro-Chromo Institute. For a $100 cash advance, you could enroll in his intensive courses in spectro-chromo therapy and learn all about the “restoration of the human RadioActive and Radio-Emanative Equilibrium by Attuned Color Waves” from Ghadiali himself—who, we are assured, was such an innate genius that back in his native India he was teaching college courses in mathematics when he was but a wee lad of eleven. (Ghadiali was so enamored of himself that he added this behemoth to his signature line: “M.D., M.E., D.C., Ph.D., L.L.D., N.D., D. Opt., D.F.C., D.H.T., D.M.T., Etc.”)
Colors!
The basic premise of his therapy was that every element exhibits one of the seven prismatic colors. Human beings are made up mostly of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, which in turn correspond to blue, red, green, and yellow. Feeling a bit ill? One of your colors is out of whack. To cure a disease, you just needed to have your faded colors amplified or your overly brilliant colors toned down.
To perform this action, Ghadiali invented a device called a Spectro-Chrome, which was basically a box with a 1,000-watt lightbulb inside it (see page 292 for a photo). Users could place colored glass plates in a window in the box to soak up the rays of specifically colored light. (Just like the blue glass craze, however, by shading the light the user was actually absorbing less of their chosen color.) Like a kinky version of an Easy-Bake Oven, the Spectro-Chrome required standing—nude—in front of the light box during specific lunar phases. The impact of the moon cycle on an electrically operated light box remains … mysterious.
The Surgical Ray and the Bureau of Cosmotherapy
Around the same time that Ghadiali was transporting his secretary across state lines, colored glass made a comeback when the Von Schilling Surgical Ray hit the market. Basically a thick circle of colored glass similar to a hand mirror, the Surgical Ray could be held above your ache or injury to concentrate a particular color of light on it.
Following similar principles, the book The Seven Keys to Colour Healing: A Complete Outline of the Practice was written by Roland Hunt of the Bureau of Cosmotherapy (haven’t you heard of it?) in 1940. Hunt used bad poetry as a way to underscore his points about the benefits of chromotherapy:
In Coolness new, as refreshing dew Tone Thou my speech, O Ray of Blue—And make It True, And make It True.
The claim for which Hunt was so desperately seeking veracity was the notion that blue-tinted water—which he dubbed “Ceruleo”—could cure dysentery, cholera, and the bubonic plague. By way of evidence, Hunt assured his readers (assuming there was more than one) that in Bombay thousands of lives had been saved from the plague by the consumption of Ceruleo.
Not sure which color to use for your particular injury or disease? No worries—the Spectro-Chrome came with a special chart to help you navigate this complex decision-making process. Yellow light aided food digestion, green light stimulated pituitary glands, red light built hemoglobin, blue light increased vitality, lemon light restored bones. And so on.
Somehow, the Spectro-Chrome was a hit: Ghadiali had sold nearly eleven thousand devices by 1946, earning over one million dollars. Like Kellogg, who touted noninvasive, non-pharmaceutical procedures, Ghadiali’s promise of “No Diagnosis, No Drugs, No Surgery” struck a chord with an audience that was wary of the medical establishment. And the medical establishment wasn’t happy about that.
In 1925, the successful salesman was arrested after transporting his nineteen-year-old secretary across state lines for “immoral purposes.” It wasn’t his first—or last—brush with the law. Under intense scrutiny from the AMA and the FDA, Ghadiali had legal troubles for the rest of his life; his agile mind, however, always found new ways to sell his products. Instead of advertising its ability to “cure,” Ghadiali’s promotional material now advertised the “normalating” influence of the Spectro-Chrome. Patients were not being “treated,” they were having their “radioactive and radio-emanative equilibrium” restored.
Once the language was switched, it was increasingly difficult for governmental authorities to prosecute Ghadiali for making false or misleading claims. If people really wanted to throw away their money on the “normalating influence” of a Spectro-Chrome machine, well, it’s a free country.
Ghadiali died in 1966; his ideas have somehow survived him. The Dinshah Health Society of Malaga, New Jersey, a registered nonprofit administered by Ghadiali’s heirs, is still in operation today selling a variety of light-therapy books and related products.
The Violet Ray
At the intersection of electrotherapy and light therapy was the violet ray, invented by Nikola Tesla and first demonstrated at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The device applied a high voltage and high frequency (but low current) stream of electricity to the body as a healing agent. When the glass electrode was energized, it emitted an intriguing and mysterious violet glow, which in and of itself produced a powerful placebo effect (because, cool!). The devices were manufactured by a variety of US companies and advertised for numerous conditions, including “brain fog,” which could be cured by the following method:
Applicator No. 1 over forehead and eyes. Also treat the back of head and neck with a strong current in direct contact with the skin. Treat the spine and hold the electrode in the hand. Ozone inhalations for about four minutes are also of importance.
After numerous lawsuits and the intervention of the FDA, violet ray manufacturers were eventually forced to halt production in the early 1950s. Today, violet ray machines are a much sought-after item on the collector’s market for their association with Nikola Tesla, who has obtained cultlike status in the years since his death, and because it is indeed pretty cool to see the violet ray light up a deep purple color. Meanwhile, a new device dubbed the “violet wand,” which does basically the same thing as the violet ray but for a completely different reason, has been adopted by the BDSM community.
A Radiolux Violet Ray set, circa 1930.
Lighting the Way Forward
Today, we know that light helps the body synthesize Vitamin D, and light therapy is used by modern physicians for the treatment of an assortment of ailments, including seasonal affective disorder, depression, jet lag, psoriasis, and infantile jaundice.
The real benefit that came out of the nineteenth century’s blue light craze was really quite simple: the invention of the modern sunroom. Because it turns out that humans actually do enjoy the chance to sit around and soak up rays in the comfort of their own homes.
They just don’t need blue windowpanes to do it.
Children, with nurses, receive “ray treatment” in London, 1938.
27
Radionics
Of Nickelback, the Dynamizer, the Oscilloclast, an “Eager and Excitable Little Jewish Doctor,” an Undercover Guinea Pig, and Long-Distance Healing
Radio frequencies are difficult to understand. As with electricity and wi-fi, most of us are content just to know that radio waves work and are not concerned with how they work. You turn on the radio, dial into a station, and, like magic, you’re suddenly listening to a song. And that song might possibly be More Than a Feeling, by Boston, one of the most frequently played radio songs of all time. There’s something comforting in that.
In the early twentieth century, radio was the flashy new tech and had all the glamour and speculation about it that today surrounds driverless cars or even new iPhones. Thanks to recent technological advances by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, who created the first commercially successful radio transmission system in 1895, the popular excitement about radio waves, coupled with the lack of understanding about exactly how they worked, made a market ripe for exploitation. Medical cures that purported to harness this mysterious energy found a willing audience. This is why men like Dr. Albert Abrams were able to make a fortune by claiming to diagnose and treat illnesses … with radio waves.
Bad Vibes and the Man to Cure Them
Born in San Francisco in 1863, Albert Abrams obtained his MD in Germany at the remarkably young age of nineteen and returned to his native city in 1893 to serve as a professor of pathology at Cooper College. By the time he was in his forties, Abrams had built a solid reputation as a neurologist and was well on his way toward a distinguished career. The cracks, however, were beginning to show.
After losing his professorship due to a night-class scam, Abrams leaned more and more toward quackery, developing questionable techniques like hammering along the spine (spondylotherapy) to stimulate nerves that, in turn, were thought to stimulate the organs and heal sicknesses. The practice was touted as a cure-all for anything that ailed you.
His star treatment, though, was radionics. In 1916, Abrams published New Concepts in Diagnosis and Treatment, introducing the world to his theories. And just what were those theories? The short version: Healthy people radiate healthy energy. Diseased people radiate illness frequencies, which radionics practitioners like Abrams claimed they could detect with complex, cumbersome machines. They could then cure your disease—any disease, by the way—by tuning your illness frequency back to a healthy frequency.
It’s kind of like scanning the radio while you’re on a road trip. By some terrible twist of fate, you might find yourself suddenly tuned to a Nickelback song. This is similar to the body emanating a diseased frequency. Luckily, it’s just as easily fixed. Just like you can quickly turn the radio dial again, shuddering as you leave Nickelback safely behind you, a radionics practitioner with the right machine can just as easily retune your body to a healthy frequency.
Now for the long version (and please, pause here to take a deep breath): The human body is made up of atoms; atoms in turn are made up of electrons. Electrons vibrate, transmitting radiation, identified by radionics professionals as “ERA,” or “electronic reactions of Abrams.” If an individual is healthy, his or her electrons vibrate at a “normal” rate. If an individual is unhealthy, however, that person’s electrons vibrate at an “abnormal” rate. So, to cure a patient, a physician had to detect the unhealthy vibrations, then transmit back at the disease the same vibratory frequency that the diseased electrons were producing. This would in turn neutralize the disease and allow the electrons to return to normal vibration rates.
Returning to our Nickelback scenario, it’s like trying to get rid of one of their songs by aiming your iPod at the radio speakers, cuing up Nickelback, and blasting it back.
And it works just about as well.
Nickelback probably playing “Photograph.”
Diagnosing with the Dynamizer
So, how did radionics practitioners detect the abnormal vibrations? In predictably absurd ways.
Let’s s
ay you just received a bummer of a diagnosis from your conventional doctor. As a coping mechanism, you remind yourself that it’s always worthwhile to get a second opinion and, hey, this Dr. Abrams you’ve heard about is supposed to be able to cure anything. Why not give him a try?
After a call to his office, you are instructed to bring in a hair sample. Scratching your head at the logic there, you pluck out a hair and make your way to Abrams’s San Francisco establishment.
When you arrive, the receptionist asks if you collected your hair sample while you were facing west. She insists that this is a crucial element of the diagnosis. You don’t remember which way you were facing, so, reluctantly, you face the setting sun and again pluck a few hairs from your head.
Satisfied finally, the receptionist brings you into Abrams’s office and directs you to place your hair sample in a strange-looking medical machine she calls a Dynamizer. Enter Dr. Abrams, a confident man who bustles around the room, dimming the lights and hooking you up to the Dynamizer with a variety of wires that, he assures you, will detect your “vibrational patterns.” You are once again instructed to face west because this will ensure the proper functioning of the machine.
Abrams then hooks up the Dynamizer to a series of other machines, including one he calls a Radioclast; its defining feature, you decide, is that it simply has a lot of dials on it. The doctor assures you that the dials will be greatly useful in detecting “ohmage,” which will in turn help him pinpoint your exact disease.
He then instructs you to unbutton your shirt and pull up your undershirt. While you do so, Abrams retrieves a glass rod from his desk and begins to gently stroke your abdomen with it. You ask what exactly he hopes to gain from this. The doctor says he is looking for areas of “resonance” or “dullness.”
It all sounds very impressive, and you think to yourself that really, if he is going to all this fuss about “resonance” and “ohmage,” then surely it must work. Right?