gems, optics, physics, color science, color

Edwin D. Babbitt’s The Principles of Light and Color (1878) presents an expansive nineteenth-century theory of light, colour, and their supposed relationships to matter, physiology, psychology, and health. Babbitt discusses the physical properties of light and colour, the solar spectrum, complementary colours, and the effects he believed different wavelengths exerted upon living organisms, developing these ideas into a system of “chromopathy,” or therapeutic treatment by coloured light. The book describes coloured glass, lenses, and specially designed apparatus intended to concentrate or transmit particular portions of the spectrum, and extends its arguments to electricity, magnetism, heat, chemical action, and human physiology. Although many of Babbitt’s medical and physical theories are now scientifically obsolete, the work is historically important in the development of colour therapy and late nineteenth-century attempts to connect emerging knowledge of optics and electromagnetic phenomena with medicine and theories of vital energy. Extensively illustrated, it provides a particularly revealing account of contemporary ideas concerning the perceived physical and therapeutic powers of colour.