Ancient and Modern

The word cult crops up repeatedly in heliotherapeutic material and appears to have been employed by physicians to naturalise new medical conceptions of the sun occurring during the late nineteenth century: the transition from man's instinctive, ritualistic relationship with the sun to a modern medical one. It was common among these physicians to establish an ancient and na-tural heritage for their treatment, citing Hippocrates, Celsus, and Galen as the original advocates of sun baths (Rollier, 1923, p.1). Such ancient heritage, however, did not interfere with the simultaneous belief that light therapeutics occupied the forefront of progressive medicine, especially following Finsen's discoveries in the curative potential of light for lupus and his subsequent Nobel Prize (Allen, 1904, p.426).