Light: Medicine of the Future (1991)

By Jacob Liberman - 30 Q&As - Book Summary

Office workers under fluorescent lights face roughly twice the melanoma rate of people who work outdoors in direct sunlight. The finding, published in The Lancet on August 7, 1982, came from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Sydney’s Melanoma Clinic. Dr. Helen Shaw, the principal investigator, established that the people at lowest risk of skin cancer were those whose main outdoor activity was sunbathing. Two carefully controlled studies at the New York University School of Medicine confirmed it. Light: Medicine of the Future, published in 1991 by Jacob Liberman, gathers this finding alongside dozens of others that contradict the campaign to block ultraviolet light from human eyes and skin — a campaign that by 1990 had produced UV-400 lenses blocking the entire ultraviolet band, SPF ratings climbing past 30, and FDA radiological laboratories shielding their own fluorescent tubes with plastic sleeves so employees would not receive a trace of what the agency called the deadly ray.

Liberman is an optometrist with two doctorates and four post-doctoral fellowships, in private practice from 1973, awarded a second doctorate in 1986 specifically for his clinical discoveries with phototherapy. He trained through the College of Syntonic Optometry, the post-doctoral institution founded by Dr. Harry Riley Spitler in 1933 to develop the therapeutic application of light through the eyes. Liberman’s foreword is written by John Ott — the photobiologist whose time-lapse work on plants and mice established the documented effects of full-spectrum versus standard fluorescent lighting and whose collaboration with Duro-Test produced the first commercial full-spectrum tube, the Vita-Lite. The book combines Liberman’s sixteen years of clinical case histories with a synthesis of the documented research on light’s effects on the body’s regulatory systems.

The book appeared at the end of a fifty-year reversal. From the 1870s through the 1930s, sun therapy and color therapy were respected medical practice. Niels Finsen received the 1903 Nobel Prize for treating skin tuberculosis with ultraviolet light. Auguste Rollier ran a sun-therapy clinic in the Swiss Alps that produced documented cures of tuberculosis, colitis, anemia, gout, arteriosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, eczema, acne, lupus, sciatica, asthma, and burns. Dr. Kate Baldwin, senior surgeon at Philadelphia Woman’s Hospital for 23 years, told the Pennsylvania Medical Society in 1926 that after 37 years of medical and surgical practice she could produce quicker and more accurate results with colored light than with all other methods combined. Then in 1939 Gerhard Domagk received the Nobel Prize for sulfanilamide, the first sulfa drug, and the era of pharmacological dominance began. Light therapy was declared witchcraft and pushed out of the medical schools. By 1990, cool-white fluorescent bulbs — banned in German hospitals on the strength of Fritz Hollwich’s 1980 finding that they produce stress-level concentrations of ACTH and cortisol — illuminated almost every American school, hospital, and office.

Liberman’s framework sits within the terrain tradition. Disease arises from toxic burden, deficiency, and the disruption of the body’s relationship to its natural environment, with light as the foundational nutrient that activates metabolism and regulates the hypothalamus, the endocrine system, and the pineal. The full piece unpacks Wohlfarth’s 1982-83 school studies in Wetaskiwin showing that students under full-spectrum lighting and warm-coloured walls were absent due to illness only one-third as often as their counterparts in unchanged classrooms; Liberman’s clinical discovery that the colours a person finds most uncomfortable map almost 100 percent of the time onto the regions of the body where stress is housed or disease has developed; and the case of Liberman’s mother, who recovered 80 percent of the peripheral field of vision in an eye declared lost to optic nerve disease after twenty days of looking at turquoise light for twenty minutes daily. The eyes of children in windowless classrooms under cool-white fluorescents develop three times as many cavities as the eyes of children under full-spectrum tubes — and the cool-white tubes are still installed.

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