Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Blue Light Therapy

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Have you ever noticed an old house house that has blue glass windows? It's pretty, sure, but it's also supposed to provide healing energy. You can thank a man who really liked growing, farming, and . . .  colors for this bizarre but beautiful notion. We've got his story (and how his legacy endures) on this week's Sawbones.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saw bones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, talk is about books. One, two, one, two, three, four. We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Wow. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McAroy. And I'm Sydney McAroy. Welcome to the number one medical podcast on the Internet.

Do you, you just declare that? I do. I frequently declare that. I don't think you can beat it. I don't know, I don't know what metrics you're using though. When you see, I'm a scientist. I like to back up my statements with evidence. And this seems like a statement that you are making with no evidence.

I don't think I am. I'm pretty sure I'm right. That's science. I don't think I am. I'm pretty sure I'm right. Hey, listen, if it weren't for that sentiment, we wouldn't have a podcast. That sentiment has been a very profitable one

for us over the years, Sydney. If humanity didn't have that gut instinct that gosh darn it, they were right. Uh huh. Then we wouldn't have a show today. You know, I think that's a good, that is a nice transition to our topic this week. The to go with a good, that is a nice transition to our topic this week.

The, to go with a gut instinct that something seems right and run with it. That's a pretty app description of what I wanna tell you about. Yeah, I'm all ears. So, first of all, I wanna thank Robert, who sent us an email asking about this topic and basically informing me that it existed

because I had not heard of this specific sort of medical history moment before I wasn't aware of it and I think in part because what it ultimately will lead to is largely pseudocyan but it was a really interesting story and I had never heard of it and I guess Robert's interest started when he started investigating why so many houses from a certain period of American history have blue pains of glass in their windows. Yeah, that's weird I've never noticed that actually. Well, apparently it must be true, probably not here in West Virginia, but in other places. No, I've not seeing much blue glass. No, but there was something called the blue glass craze.

Blue, not blue grass craze. That's still happening. That's still happening. Maybe we're living it. Can you hear me? Very much in West Virginia. Can't take it all over West Virginia. Can't take a step in that trip in a revenge.

But the blue glass craze was... You're gonna be fighting to not say blue grass. I know. And for the rest of the show, if we say bluegrass with me, bluegrass. And if I do say bluegrass, I'll make a banjo noise or something to... Okay. So anyway, I want to tell you about this. I need to tell you first about Augustus James Pleasanton.

Oh, that's a lovely name. Yes, or AJ, if you prefer, to his friends. Okay. We'll be his friends. You know, we'll be buddies. AJ Pleasanton. He was born in 1808 in Washington, DC. His dad worked in the New friends. Yeah, we'll be buddies. AJ Pleasanton. He was born in 1808 in Washington, DC.

His dad worked in the State Department. He was also a hero. He fought in the War of 1812. And he was chief of the Lighthouse Department. Hmm. A very important job. Gotta keep those boats coming in. I just really like the idea that there was a point where we had a lighthouse department,

like a whole state department. There was the lighthouse department and he was in charge of it. That seems like a really fun department to be in charge of. He's the guy at the bottom who's like yelling up like, how's it going up there? They're like, good, it's on. He's like, excellent, keep doing it. Yeah, I know. Keep doing it. Keep it on. Yep, thumbs up. Well, we've talked about on previous episodes how important sailors were and like the shipping industry and everything.

So like, you gotta imagine, lighthousees were pretty darn important. Important. Just like proper pronunciation. What is the, what's gonna be a rough one today? What was the sailors thing recently where we talked about, it's the reason we have some sort of insurance or something, what's gonna be a rough one today? What was the sailors thing recently where we talked about, it's the reason we have some sort of insurance or something, what was that?

Well, we talked about the beginning, yes, because we talked about the hospitals that they set up. Oh, right, for the, yeah, yeah, I gotcha. The how that led to the creation of the public health system and then the surgeon general. Yes, surgeon general, let's, okay, Okay, sorry, I'm getting this started. I think that Coast Guard actually runs the lighthouse. Says now, they're in charge.

They're like a good fit. Yes, that seems like a good place for the lighthouse department to go. I think it was like, well, we talked about this. A lot of things that sort of shuffled around different government departments for a while. It was like in the treasury. The treasury was like the catch all, I believe, because they only made three.

And then they threw everything they didn't know what to do within the treasury. It was like the junk drawer of the government. And then they were like, we should make something new. Let's make a coast guard and put the lighthouses there. Anyway, AJ followed his dad's footsteps. He served his country. He was in the Pennsylvania, militia. He wants tried to stop some rioters in Philadelphia in 1844.

I only mentioned this because he got shot while that was happening. He does not die at this time. That would be a weird episode. Anyway, that's a little bit. That's it. It has nothing to do with medicine. No, but he got shot and he forever had a musket ball in his groin. Mm.

Just there forever. But that made walking through metal detectors, really annoying. Well, you know, in 1844, they're probably, I know they trained dogs to detect metal. I know. I know. I know. I know. That's accurate.

During the Civil War, he was appointed the rank of Brigadier General of the Pennsylvania militia. And he basically worked to defend the rank of Brigadier General of the Pennsylvania militia and He basically worked to defend the city of Philadelphia. That was his What did divisions his group? His club that's not what it's called my civilian ish ish ish ish ish showing I bet his dad is very judgmental light. Oh, nice. Defending Philadelphia. Get a lot of lighthouses there. Common embarrassment to me son. There's very few lighthouses in the downtown Philadelphia. But there probably are lighthouses in Philadelphia, right? I have no way of answering that question. And either to you, and this is the exact thinking that got us into trouble at the beginning of the episode.

Well, why don't I tell you more about AJ and you really quickly google how many lighthouses are or aren't there in Philadelphia. Thank you. After serving honorably and returning from the military, he was bored, I guess. He was in retirement. He needed a project. That happens to so many people. My grandpa retired and then he started a micro filming business. Yeah. So, you know, you got to have a project. AJ decided to get into two things. He had a couple passions. Have you figured out the lighthouse question yet?

Yeah, I've got some. Most notable seems to be the Turtle Rock lighthouse, which is built in 1887, which that's a little bit after a little bit after his tenure there. Although maybe he was walking around, Phil, and I'll feel like, God, we could use a light up sound here. Something my DNA says to me, we need a light house. So I am at the point where he has left the military

and he's getting into other things. Yeah. Okay. So he liked growing and farming, or maybe he just had to do it out of necessity, either way, it was something he was going to be doing. He also liked colors. Mm. Who doesn't? Much like my children. He liked colors.

So I guess it was either like, he could make one of those fish or price little people farms because those have growing and farming and they're very colorful. Or he could do something else. He invented that, he would have been a role one of them. He really should have. Because well, yeah, he would have made a lot more money. So he'd be like, anyway, they're made of plastic and it would be like, what are you talking about?

I like the idea that he said they're made of plastic without like, I don't know what plastic is or how to make it I just know they will be made of plastic. I'm putting the big idea out there I've got no way to achieve it, but I'm gonna put the big idea out there. Okay, plastic was admitted in 1862 So I feel very confident in my assertion that he That it hadn't really ramped up enough. I mean, maybe he heard about it in the This is Yeah, this this would have been,

so plastic was in existence. That is settled. It would be so new. Why do people keep asking you to date a fish or prize little people? He didn't fall. He didn't let go. He got all that he didn't do with plastic.

This is not where we're going. He was investigating the health benefits of different colors. Okay. That is the interest he had. investigating the health benefits of different colors. Okay. That is the interest he had. He wanted to know specifically different colors of light is where he really sort of focused, color in general, but like the idea of light filtered through different colors,

like panes of glass or something, and the impact that could have on living things. Now, this is before you've probably, you're hearing this and you're thinking, well, so he was interested in crematherapy. Yeah. Because that is what that is, the use of color to heal or treat or whatever. Right. It is not a, it was not a thing yet. This is before. That was a thing. There were previous,

like moments throughout ancient history where people had sort of talked about color as part of different health regimens and that kind of thing, but the concept of like chromotherapy did not exist yet at this point in history. You can find some references in ancient Greek and Egyptian medicine to an extent. You could kind of compare some of chromotherapy to like the chakras, you know, but that's not exactly what we're talking about either, right? The idea of just like, here's some purple for your cough was not. I don't know. I don't know. Purple is for coughs. It's not real medicine, so it didn't teach me that. Ibn Sina had discussed the importance of color

in diagnosing different ailments, and had mentioned a little bit of this sort of idea in his writings of like, you know, red is, you've got to be careful with red colors, because they can motivate the flow of blood and things like that. So like this idea that color had some physical impact on the body. It had been introduced, but by the 19th century, we had really all of these concepts of color and its healing abilities and all that. We're still very much linked to spiritual traditions of medicine.

Which medicine was, for a long time, it was very closely tied to spiritual traditions of medicine. Which medicine was for a long time, it was very closely tied to spiritual beliefs. By the 19th century, those were separating. Medicine was becoming a very empiric, well, slowly, empiric thing, something in the physical world, something you could see in measure, and something quite detached from spiritual traditions. So when Pleasanton introduced these ideas of color as some sort of medicine and the impact that like looking at a color or being in bathed in a color could have on your body,

this is kind of calling back to these more ancient traditions and sort of revolutionary at this moment. If you can call something revolutionary that's wrong, can you do that? Is it revolutionary if it's also not gonna work? Ooh, yeah, revolutionary. I think, yeah. It flies in the veins.

It's a bit of a change in something. I mean, if it changes the way we do things, it's a revolution. So if we didn't use to think of bad thing, and then we started thinking of bad thing, I guess it isn't a sense of revolutionary. So he started working on experiments. I mean, he wanted to test his theory. He wasn't just like saying this was true. He wanted to actually try it out and see if he was right. To see if different colors, specifically colored light, had any effect on living things.

And the first color he chose to explore was blue. Why? I don't know. Basically, the sky is blue. True. And that must be important for our human bodies. What else would it be blue for us if it weren't for humans? And so we must be living in part because of the blueness that we're exposed to of the sky. And for more proof of that, compare how plants do in the spring and summer when there's

lots of blue sky to how plants do in the fall and winter when there's not. When there's not. Okay. Right. Yes. Which it's so funny because this is like a perfect illustration of correlation. Right. And not causation. Yeah. Like it's the sky is you

see more blue sky in the spring and summer plants are alive. Hence blue makes plants live. It's like every guys I've noticed every time we put on these incredible bikinis and bathing trunks, it gets hotter. It's like every time you see people in those, check the temperature, it's hot. And it's like if we want some nice months in December, January, let's get our bikinis on. Let's get our trunks on. Let's get out there. And then it'll be warm.

It always works that way. It's really fascinating because it's this idea that like if you did nothing else to plants, but put them in a blue room, they would grow. I don't know if that would work. I don't know. They knew this would be the water. And well, and Pleasanton, I'm saying this sort of ingest because Pleasanton obviously did know some things

about growing plants farming. And as we'll see, like, tending to animals and crops and whatnot. Clearly he had some other knowledge. So he knew that it wasn't just the blue. There were other things plants need, like dirt, water. But the blue to him seemed to be an important part of life and health and growth and all that good stuff. It wasn't just the other things associated with those seasons. It was the blue itself, the color of the sky itself. So he decided to start experiments

to prove this theory about blue. He started with grapes. So he had a greenhouse. And he, that's a bad start. Should've got a blue. He, so he put pains of glass in the greenhouse. Some of them were like cobalt blue. And some were still regular old glass, right?

Because you've got to have a control group. And he sounds like it's not so far Sydney. Which like this must have been a lovely looking greenhouse, right? Wouldn't that be beautiful alternating pains of cobalt blue and transparent glass? I thought that it was a lovely building. And he grew grapes in it. And some of them were bathed in this blue light. Some of them just got regular light.

And after months of observation, it was pretty clear to him the grapes that were growing under the blue light were just better. Okay. They were like bigger and juicier. And so it settled. What are you, what are you all up in the fit about?

Like it sounds like he's right and it's settled. So he loves science, right? But that's just grapes, right? Like so he wrote that he wrote and it, he, there's a whole book I'm gonna get to that that you can read about this. So you can read exactly how he measured everything. But basically what he said was the grapes are better.

The blue grapes are better. My blue greenhouse grew better, blue grapes than the clear grapes. But the grapes aren't blue. I can't stress this enough. They just look blue because of the light, but if you take them into the other part of the greenhouse with the clear panels of glass, they'll look regular. Because we don't really have blue food.

We heard about this on that episode of... Dakota Ring. Dakota Ring, yes. Thank you. Excellent. Oh gosh. That was frustrating. Yes. So anyway the blue greenhouse grew better grapes The blue green The blue greenhouse grew better blue grapes. So anyway, he patented his blue greenhouse, which is great. Like I'm on to that. Already good. But that's not enough. He's not going to stop there.

He's got more science to do. And I'm going to tell you about it. Okay. But first let's go to the billing department. Let's grow. Because the mouth. Hi, I'm Bez, and I'm Teresa. And we're the hosts of One Bad Mother, a podcast about parenting.

Parenting is hard, and we have no advice, but we do see you doing it. Hulk if you like to do it. What was, didn't we have a bumper sticker a while back that was like, Hulk if you did it. That's what I thought. I think it was hunk if you're doing it. Why did we not have her make them? We did like them. I think they're still in the max fun store.

Hulk, hunk, you're doing it. Thanks, Ms. So are you. Each week we'll be here to remind you that you're doing a good job. You can find us on maximumfun.org. Hawk Hawk, tutututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututututut All right, so our man Augustus just took a brief detour off of science to dip his toe into commerce. I had to get that back real quick and then back to work. So he started putting pigs in blue light next. Like I said, it wasn't just plants.

He wanted to check it out on animals. So he raised pigs that were exposed to like, and again, this isn't like a dangerous thing. It's just putting pains of blue glass in windows so that the light that filters through is blue. And so the pig spend a lot of time. Because I guess maybe pigs lay around a lot, right? Yeah, seems like it. So you could just make sure that... Don't let me or Charlotte Swapful use her inactive animals. And he compared them to regular old lighted pigs. Whatever light, whatever light pigs usually like.

A light or a spotlight. I don't know. Anyway, he compared them and he said the blue pigs win. Again, they're just better pigs. The blue pigs win again. So then he moved on to cows. Okay. And he did the same thing. Same design, blue cows, regular cows, blue cows want again, they're better. Blue cows. Yeah, they just grow

better. Like, and he wanted, he wanted everybody to know, like farmers and, and grape growers, everybody, hey, if this works for things as diverse as grapes and pigs and cows, oh my, it will work for any living thing. So he started by giving like speeches and he started targeting like the agricultural industry initially. Like, I want you all to know about this sort of revolution and you could do this on your farms and in your greenhouses and you could also grow better things and sell them, I guess, for more money and, you know, everything would be better.

But then it occurred to him, you know, if it works this great in plants and farm animals, what about humans? So he decided we needed to try these methods out on human beings and see if it also had the same effect on human bodies. So he tried it out on two patients. Okay. Mom, who had just given birth to a baby that was early, premature. And they needed to stay in sort of, they were kind of staying in the hospital to, for the baby to grow and to sort of keep an eye on them both. You know, because back then we didn't have a ton. We weren't really great at taking care of premature babies staying in the hospital too, for the baby to grow and to sort of keep an eye on them both. Because back then we didn't have a ton,

we weren't really great at taking care of premature babies yet. Right. So they knew they needed to keep them there and watch them for a while and make sure everybody's gonna be okay. And so one of the things he said is, let's keep them in a room with blue light.

Right, let's put some blue paints of glass in here and get some blue light. Shots, yeah, it works out pigs. Yes, it worked for the pigs and the cows and the grapes. So it's gonna work for mom and baby. And apparently they did really well, which is a great ending to that part of the story regardless of the pseudoscience.

I am really glad that that happened, but they did really well. And so he thought, okay, well, that's two humans. Let's try it on some more. So he also tried it on, there was like a chronically ill woman who couldn't walk because of her chronic sort of pain and arthritis was the kind of picture I got from the description. And he put blue light on her and then she could walk and her pain was gone. There was a guy who had like an arm that had rheumatism and he put his arm in blue light and it got all better and he was fine

Somebody had their baldness healed Someone else's fertility was restored A lot of people would sleep under blue light and say that their sleep was so much better Sleeping under blue light then I guess darkness. Okay lower back pain all the major ailments healed, fixed, cured, treated completely better, simply by putting, I mean, for the most part, by putting pains of blue glass into windows so that the light that filtered through was blue. Certainly, I guess there are other ways to expose people to blue, but that seemed to be the big, the big way to do it. And he published a book on

the topic in 1877. The title of this book is very long. I'm ready. The influence of the blue ray of the sunlight and of the blue color of the sky and the subtitle in developing animal and vegetable life in arresting disease and in restoring health and acute and chronic disorders to human and domestic animals. Based on the novel push by saying. That's always what you say. I know that's one of my favorite jokes of yours. Okay, well as long as you like it, I don't know. That's fine. I don't care if I repeat myself.

If it gets a laugh, I do, I'll keep doing it. Anyway, so he wrote this book and published it. And by the time he actually published the book, I should say, like this had caught on sort of in the lay public. People were interested and intrigued and liked this. It was already out there from his speeches and like he had published like single sheet papers and stuff on it previously. And so word of this blue therapy had already spread, even though a lot of people had interest in it, the

medical community, the scientific community was, I mean, skeptical. Yeah. Yeah, to say the least, they were quite skeptical. But the public was enthralled, everybody wanted in on it, and it seemed like something that you could have access to pretty easily, right? Like, if you had the money, you could replace pains of glass in your windows with blue. And that it's exactly what a lot of people did. The price of blue glass would increase like 50%. People were putting blue glass in there, not just like in hospitals

were doing this, but like, and in farms, of course, in the agricultural industry, but also in just their homes, we're replacing glass with blue glass, so that all the time, they would be bathed in this blue light. They started making drug vials out of blue glass, which was actually one of the things that specifically upset a lot of scientists and got a lot more backlash, is that for certain medicines, it's really important that they're stored in opaque vials.

And they started making them out of this pretty blue glass because it was the fashion. Reducing their efficacy. Yes, so it was like bad. And so there were a lot of articles written about it. It was a very viral trend. And so all the papers were writing about it. And like, depending on who covered it,

it was either with some earnestness, like, I don't know. Seems like blue lights, great. Nobody likes it. And then others who were like, like that specifically, there was an article in the Boston Globe where they were like, this is ridiculous.

And while it seems amusing, it's like basically, we're running out of patients for this and could everybody stop please. This is ridiculous. The scientific community was pretty much united that this is nothing. Could you please stop with the blue glass? Or if you must, at least don't do it to drugs. Anyway, just as quickly as it was popular as with many viral trends, it faded. By the end of 1877, the same year, his book was published. People stopped buying blue glass like that. I mean, burnout. Yeah, it was, it built 1877

the year he published his book was really both like the peak year and the end like that, you know, and the year it started to fall off because he had already gotten that information out there mainly through the media and everything prior to publishing his book. Right. So it, the trend vanished pretty quickly. There was so much backlash from the scientific community. Maybe that was part of it. Maybe it was that it didn't work.

And so people kept doing this, spending all this money to put blue paints of glass or replace all the paints of glass in their house, and then it didn't do anything. Maybe it was that people just lost interest. Something else happened that was cooler or weirder, or you could spend your money on to distract yourself, I don't know.

I don't know. Green light, okay. Green don't know. Green light. Green light. Green light. Got hot. A different color. So anyway, the idea, the ideas didn't disappear. Even though the blue glass industry stopped making so much cash, the idea stuck because

AJ inspired another young thinker, a man named Edwin Babitt, who initially got his start writing books about pinmanship, which is like a fascinating thing to write books about, by the way. I have to find these books. It's important. I'm worried. What do you write about pinmanship other than here is good pinmanship and here is bad pinmanship.

You write it, you're being restricted in your handwriting? Like, anyway, here's how I do it. If it's gonna be about pinmanship. You would think, right? There was a pit, the girls have this book, the Charlie's handwriting textbook for school has a letter from the author at the beginning, which is like, okay, but he's calm down.

And he puts his signature at the beginning, which is like, okay, but he's going down. And he puts his signature at the end, and it is absolutely madding. It is insane. Like, flourishes on the edges and like, else that dip into the, and it is absolutely just like, anyway, kids, here's how I do it.

Maybe 70, get to my level. It's like, we all have phones. Stop it. This is a waste of time. She had a writing classes for the first half of the year and then started Christmas, they just stopped. And I think that finally we all decided to like, this is a waste of time.

It is really interesting. I don't know. I don't have a strong feeling. I feel like we're gonna get emails about this because I imagine that there are people out there who have really strong feelings about kids learning like cursive. Oh, don't even. Do you have strong feelings on this? I mean, I'm fine with it. I'm not going to I'm not going to protest our kids learning cursive, but I would say it's not

among like the top things I need them to learn. They're actually saying no cursive. They should know how to sign the name of that course. You have a strong opinion on this. Of course I do. I'm a white man. I've got a strong opinion about everything. Come on. We're going to get emails about this. Whether you want it or not, I got opinions.

Come out of my caboose. So after he wrote these books about pinmanship, he turned to spiritualism. Mm. As you do. He prayed to be more interested. I'm not telling you too much about this guy because I feel like this will be a whole other episode that we're leading into here.

So he would then later award himself a doctorate of magnetism from his own school. You can do that? Of magnetism. Well, I guess if you start a school and then you graduate from it, did you get your own knowledge? I know when you graduate from your own school, just like, I've gone like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm is they knew that there were doctors of magnets out there who could answer their question.

Dr. Magnet does sound like a fantastic like Green Lantern villain. Dr. Magnet, you know what that was? Stop me. There's already Magneto. Yeah, but Dr. Magnet is like DC's rip off of Magnet O trying to cash in on it. So. And how like they can't, like they made they have to call Captain Marvel books shazam because Captain Marvel's already a thing over in Marvel's neck of the woods

right. So those books have to be called shazam even though his name's not shazam and never will be shazam. And if you call him shazam you sound like a clown. Is his name Captain Marvel seems Captain Marvel it's not shazam. So DC made somebody named Captain Marvel. Yeah the book's called shazam. I know but like named Captain Marvel? Yeah, the book's called Shazam. I know, but like there was already Marvel. Why did they make a book about a Captain Marvel and there already was Marvel and Captain Marvel and that fits.

Sydney's, Sydney's Twitter handle is at Sydney, Matt Allroy. So if you were just tweet and heard the answer to that and take as many tweets as you like. There's no, there's no price tag on tweets folks to stretch out. Is it just because Captain DC sounds silly? Get deep into there. So many e-mails. I'm going to get me back. No, I'm the one who reads them. So if you're yelling at Justin, just remember I'm the one who reads them. Well, I mean,

you could start. I'm just gonna forward them to you. Just start an EC comics. Don't go any further than that. 44 is as far back as we need to go and just walk through the entire essay. So Dr. Magnets, wasn't satisfied with this form of pretend medicine. He needed a new form of pretend.

He was like the, Gwyneth Paltrow of his time, basically, right? Like, he needed something new. And so. Drag COVID survivor Gwyneth Paltrow Sydney. I know, I am very, we have discuss this. I'm very glad that she survived COVID and I encourage her to do whatever she personally feels

helps her on her health journey. Just please stop trying to sell it to other people who are maxing out their credit cards to buy your shoes and necklace. Anyway, he started looking for something new and he found a book. He found a very succinctly titled, The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and the Blue Color of the Sky in developing animal and vegetable life and arresting disease and restoring health and acute and chronic disorders to human domestic animals. And he was...

Is it the full title, because I thought at the end it was, was it, was the... It's... Anyway, so he found this book by AJ Pleasanton and he was inspired. And even though the blue glass craze had ended, and AJ went back to,

I don't know, whatever, whatever he was doing. I'm not gonna, I know usually I kill him off in these episodes. You're not gonna fall into the grave. I'm not, I'm not. AJ finished out his days doing something. Probably more experiments. You're not relevant to our fucking.

Something with grapes and cows and pigs, oh my. But, uh, Babbit took up the mantle. And in the following year, he published the principles of light and color, including among other things, the harmonic laws of the universe, the ethereal atomic philosophy of force, chromochemistry, chromotherapeutics, and the general philosophy of the fine forces together with numerous discoveries and crash-coll applications.

I blame AJ, actually, for that. That, because, like, Edwin looked at that, I was like, I guess that's how you write a big, well, I mean, I guess that's how you get a big hit. You gotta stretch out the title. And following that, the next year, even after writing all that title in 1878, which like, that must have taken the whole year, but he did it and put a book with it.

Then he published the Wonders of Light and Color, including Chromopathy or the new science of color healing. Better. 1870. The wonders of light and color, end of title, and then like, maybe so, I don't know, that I feel like he's getting there though. This, this is the birth really of chromotherapy, and it doesn't work, but here is where it started. That seems like if you're gonna talk about chroma therapy, it seems like in a future episode,

it seems like a spoiler to us. Now that it doesn't work. Well, don't we all know that looking at the color red won't heal you? Don't we know that? Don't you know that if your arm hurts, if you expose it to blue light, that doesn't help it. And I know you could get sort of pedantic about this

and start talking about blue light in exposure to screens. Yes, and our concerns, you know, on our eyes. But like this is a that is, can we accept that that is different than the idea that like standing next to a blue wall makes you feel better? Yes. And again, I'm not talking about emotionally or spiritually. I am talking about physical effects of seeing a color on the human body. Yes. And we'll have to do an episode on chromotherapy at some point. But not now, because now this episode is... No, this episode is done.

This episode is concluded, and thank you so much for listening to it. We sure appreciate you. We got a book. It's the The Solbund's book. Now I'm paperback with new content about quarantines and stuff like that. Please buy that book. We've also got some cool merchandise.

If you go to macklewaremerch.com, you can find a solbona's heavy thing to horseshoe crab today shirt. You can find probably some other stuff on there too. You all cure all's curing nothing. We got our vaccine shirt. And thank you for buying the vaccine's products helps to support the immunization action coalition,

which you can find more information on at immunized.org. And I got a lot of great resources there. And thank you for getting your vaccine. Go get your vaccine if you can. Go get your COVID vaccine if you can. Your COVID vaccine, if you're eligible. I encourage everybody to do so, and I really love all the tweets we get showing me that you're showing us, I think of them for me, but I guess they're for you too, Justin.

Showing off that you've gotten your vaccine and you're part of the charge towards her immunity. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, the taxpayers also for the use of their song medicines as the intro and outro of our program. And thanks to you for listening. It's going to do it for us. So until next time, my name is Justin McRaw. I'm Sydney McRaw. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright!

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