The Principles of Light and Color

About this book

Colour pours through a prism and becomes, in Edwin D. Babbitt's system, a key to the workings of nature and the human body. He proposes that different hues possess distinct influences on health, temperament and spiritual development.

Babbitt's illustrated treatise combines optical diagrams, speculative physiology and proposals for healing through coloured light. Modern medicine does not support his curative claims. The plates, filled with radiant colour wheels, human figures and devices for exposing patients to light, preserve the elaborate visual world of a period when the spectrum seemed to promise answers to almost everything.