Endorsements

Soaking up the rays is the first book to investigate light therapy's earliest developments in Britain through its visual and material cultures, from 1890 to 1940. Used to treat tuberculosis, rickets, numerous infections, and skin diseases, light therapy emerged internationally in the 1890s at the forefront of modern medicine. By the 1920s it was a leading treatment among the medical community and the public, thanks in no small part to its visual representation. Woloshyn approaches archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles as entry points into Britain's history of using light, whether natural (heliotherapy) or artificial (phototherapy), in the fight against disease and 'sun-starvation'. These images and objects actively contributed to light therapy's definition and, above all, represented in visual form how light was conceptualised to act upon the body - but rarely in clear or simple ways. Overexposed and heavily retouched photographs, colour pamphlets of suntanned bodies verging on the radioactive, and Art Deco advertisements of ultraviolet lamps' penetrating rays complicate an easy telling of the therapy's acceptance and appeal. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day. Soaking up the rays repositions light therapy as a medical practice that was contentious, unstable, and messy from its very inception. It forges a new path for exploring the British (medical, social, and individual) body's fickle love of the light. It 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.