Tania Woloshyn, Soaking up the Rays

Soaking up the Rays presents one of the first monographs to examine the controversial histories and visual cultures of light therapy in Britain. Tania Woloshyn explains a wide variety of light therapies available from the late 19th to early 20th century and the illnesses (both medical and aesthetic) that they treated. Woloshyn’s purpose is not to measure their ‘success’. Instead, she evaluates both the changing historical contexts and visual ‘representations’ of ultraviolet technologies of health and beauty. Both Simon Carter and Annie Jamieson have published on British actinic histories, but their works did not contextualise the visual cultures in such detail.1 Woloshyn’s book is certainly relevant for readers of public health and policy; she regularly refers to the British populations’ fixation with suntanning and skin cancer (evident by the reoccurring links to contemporary Cancer Research campaigns (pp.256–57)). The great spread and depth of her visual analysis builds on the academic histories of medicine, health, art and early 20th-century Britain. Woloshyn, however, provides a valuable model framework to be developed by researchers from many other disciplines that apply ‘close looking, critical analysis, and much contextualisation’ to images that are ‘problematic: confounding, ambiguous, and downright odd’ (p.21)

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Visual arts · Visual culture · Computer Science · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Medicine · History

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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