Lupus patient, before and after photographs.
Lupus patient, before and after photographs.
Photothérapie et photobiologie: role thérapeutique et role biologique de la lumière / par Leredde et Pautrier. Paris: Masson, 1903. (p.209) Private collection.
Danish physician Niels Ryberg Finsen is known as the inventor of phototherapy or artificial light therapy, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1903. He began experimenting with phototherapy for the treatment of lupus in the 1890s. Finsen published his findings in Danish throughout the 1890s. These were gathered and translated into English as early as 1901 in a book called Phototherapy; the French version appeared in 1903, though shorter works of his had already been published in French and German by 1899. Before-and-after photographs of lupus patients like this one were included in all of these publications. Photographs such as these were employed for their documentary function, to record the progress of treatment and healing-- evidence of the efficacy of light therapy.
Private collection.