The influence of light on the skin / by Robert L. Bowles.

  • Bowles, Robert L. (Robert Leamon), 1834-1913.
Date:
[1897?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of light on the skin / by Robert L. Bowles. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    JL J 2 THE INFLUENCE OF LIGHT ON THE SKIN. Pathologically, also from its exposed position, it is liable to all kinds of changes, primarily from the excessive action of physiological influences, from physical and chemical injury, from the attacks of malign animals, and from the invasion of horrid parasites and microbes of every description. The second part of my subject, the part that Physics play in the disturbances and derangements of the skin, I approach with the profoundest diffidence. I will not pretend to expound to you the laws of Physics : as a physician is constantly compelled to apply some of the forces of Nature in his daily work, it is to be expected that he is at least informed of its elementary principles, and that he can, on occasion, become better instructed in those principles. I will, therefore, only venture to try and make clear to you some of the views connected with Light, and to elucidate as much as possible some of its actions on the skin which I wish to submit for your discussion. Heat, Light, Electricity, Chemical Action, Gravitation, Cohesion, Motion, and so forth, tools of the physician equally with the physicist and the engineer, are all transformable into one another, and interchangeable backwards and forwards in every possible way ; in form and number these changes are endless, in time eternal. And yet, according to many of our highest authorities they may all be expressed in a single word—“ Motion ”—and the changes spoken of, as the transformation of energy. The radiant energy of light is believed to make itself evident by a wave-like action, transverse to the line of propagation like the waves of a shaken rope, a vibration of an ether supposed to permeate space. A beam of light is, as you know, by a prism, readily divisible into the primary colours of the Solar Spectrum; and each respective colour, red, yellow, or blue, has special attributes or properties; primarily heat, luminosity, chemical action. Each of these colours shade into other colours and may be sub-divided, and each sub-division has been shown to have its peculiar selective action on chemicals, on the retina, on the living blood, and on the skin and tissues generally. These selective actions, when progressing in an orderly manner, are physiological and beneficent to the organism, in excess or deficiency, pathological and eminently malign. There are portions of the Solar Spectrum, however, which are