11th Mar 2008
Silly science from Kellogg
Jim Dunn blogged about an advertisement for your very own personal “light bath”. I somehow doubt that this was found in lots of bathrooms, even in 1909 when it would have being advertised.
At first I thought this might be a weird way to get more Vitamin D (something which is easier to accomplish by standing in sunlight for a few minutes). Turns out it was a wacky invention to help rid the body of toxins and improve overall health through light therapy — not due to a bit of Vitamin D (though that surely helped), but basically baking yourself.
Such fripperies were more usually found at sanitariums than your personal bathroom. The “Electrotherapy Museum” has scans of a chapter of Medical Electricity, Röntgen Rays, And Radium (by Dr. Sinclair Tousey) which delves into phototherapy. It has great drawings of a wide range of “light bath” designs, from the cabinet for full-body exposure to models which curved around your arm or torso for more localized treatment.
An 1895 collection of Medical Review (page 195) indicates that John Kellogg (yes, the health nut satirized in The Road to Wellville) claimed its invention:
The author claims to be the first to construct a bath of this kind. It is made in the form of a cabinet with fifty or sixty incandescent lamps arraned in rows inside… It has already been demonstrated by Siemens and others that the electric light promotes growth in plants, encourages development of chlorophyll, and the setting and ripening of fruits.
I will cheerfully admit that radiant heat (such as you get from an incandescent bulb) would heat up a person more quickly than convective heat (such as you get in a sauna or “hot air bath”). That’s about the only advantage I can see. There’s nothing in light that’s going to drastically improve your health, at least not more than you’d get having a nice stroll outside. It certainly won’t improve development of chlorophyll in humans, nor result in extensive “detoxification.”
An excerpt from Kellogg’s 1927 “study” on his electric light bath is today used as evidence of the detoxifying effect of saunas. Even odder, a branch of light therapy apparently evolved from “a great way to warm somebody up” to “light rays make you feel better”. There’s a modern-day version which uses LEDs. (It’s patent pending, so you know it must be good.)
For reasons that are unclear to me, “radium” was of old used as a synonym for nuclear radiation or perhaps anything radioactive. That’s particularly odd, since the word was coined by Marie Curie to refer to the (at that time not yet isolated) most radioactive element present in the pitchblende she was always working with. (Her second Nobel prize was for her ultimate elucidation of radium chemistry–and she got sympathy for having her husband run over by a horse and cart.) Perhaps the doubt by some people that radium actually existed as an element led to the term’s adoption in more general use. However that general use extended to (fairly) reputable scientists. The “Radium Laboratory” in Vienna (while a haven for incompetent researchers) was, for a while, considered a serious facility.