Negotiating light therapy. Kellogg versus Finsen, and the controversy about the health effects of light rays around 1900

Abstract

Western medicine has produced different rationales for the application of light rays to cure diseases in the 201h century. Since the 1980s, physicians have used bright light for treating mental disorders. In the interwar period, however, physicians regarded ultraviolet rays rather than bright light as medically relevant. This view goes back to the 1890s, when the physician (and later Nobel Price laureate) Niels R. Finsen started treating skin tuberculosis with light rays. However, Finsen was not the only physician who utilized the new electric light to develop effective therapies. Famous American inventor of the breakfast cereal and eugenicists, John Harvey Kellogg used incandescent lamps to heat a sweatbox. Consequently, two different therapeutic schools emerged from these therapeutic experiments. This article shows how these two schools negotiated the use of light therapy and how a specific idea of medically interesting light rays emerged thereby.