History
Many ancient cultures practiced various forms of heliotherapy, including people of the Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Rome. The Inca, Assyrian and early German settlers also worshipped the sun as a health bringing deity. Indian medical literature dating to 1500 BC describes a treatment combining herbs with natural sunlight to treat non-pigmented skin areas. Buddhist literature from about 200 AD and 10th-century Chinese documents made similar references.
Faroese physician Niels Finsen is believed to be the father of modern phototherapy. He developed the first artificial light source for this purpose, and used his invention to treat lupus vulgaris. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1903.
Since then a large array of treatments have been developed from the use of controlled light. Though the popular consumer understanding of "light therapy" is associated with treating seasonal affective disorder and skin conditions like psoriasis, other applications include the application of low level laser, red light, near-infrared and ultraviolet lights for pain management, hair growth, skin treatments, and accelerated wound healing.
Read more about this topic: Light Therapy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)