Paul Collins - Banvard's Folly - Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World

Pleasonton himself found that a mule, which he discovered after a horse trader had fleeced him to be profoundly deaf and arthritic, could be cured by a few months in a stable with blue glass and clear glass in the transom. "The removal of this deafness," Pleasonton propounded in another speech in 1874,

"was produced by an electromagnetic current, evolved by the two lights upon his auditory nerves and exciting them to healthy action."

What topped it all off was a letter attesting that a premature infant, born paralyzed, had gained the power of movement after being set for long periods under some blue glass. Another infant, a one-month-old girl under the care of Dr. William McLaury, had a "tumour about the size of a robin's egg"; after one hour of blue light on the tumor a day, McLaury found that it disappeared in six weeks.

Pleasonton was now convinced that the public at large needed to know about blue light. It was one thing to explain blue light to neighbors and in specialized horticultural magazines; it was another to bring it to the attention of the world. That would require nothing less than an entire book.

A. J. Pleasonton's 1876 volume The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky is one of the most striking medical texts ever written--it is visually arresting, with an appropriate powder-blue binding. Open it up, and you'll see why Pleasonton's long-suffering printers in Philadelphia, Claxton Kensen and Haffelfinger, found their author to be something of a challenge. Pleasonton demanded the entire book be printed on tinted paper in light blue ink-because, as he patiently explained, it would

"relieve the eyes of the reader from the great glare, occasioned by the reflection of gas light at night from the white paper usually employed in the printing of books." Whatever was used to tint the paper, it oxidized badly over the years--readers today will squint hard to read the faint blue ink stamped on what appears to be wet beach sand.

But it does make for very interesting reading.

Only the first quarter of the volume's 230-odd pages deal directly with blue light; these pages are largely reprints of Pleasonton's lectures, as well as a selection of letters from both astonished colleagues and beseeching invalids.

But the rest of the book is filled with speculations on electricity and its effect on everything from glaciers to the buoyancy of ships in water. It is the most remarkably eccentric assemblage of hypotheses ever to make it past a

copy editor. Take, for instance, the following passage: Our sun is simply a huge reflector of light. The gray covering of his nucleus or body is represented in our mirror by the metallic covering we place on the backs of our glasses .... rays of light from every luminous object in the universe, mingling together, and reflected from this gray covering of the sun, furnish the white sunlight that illuminates the world.

Heat destroys gravitation ... Now, if what our astronomers tell us of the inconceivably high temperature of the sun be true, there can be no gravitation towards its centre .... Heat disintegrates solids, separates their molecules, destroys their densities, and consequently is opposed to gravitation, which is the attraction of densities. Alas! for poor Sir Isaac Newton and his theory of centripedal and centrifugal forces!

Nor did Pleasonton limit himself to the earth and sky. Just as Puritans saw the providential hand of God in every stone on the ground and every bird in the sky, Pleasonton sees the force of electricity in every living and dead thing-even in the drunken arguments between spouses late at night: The sexes are oppositely electrified-hence their mutual attraction for each other. Now give them the same electricities, and mutual repulsion immediately results .... It has been shown that the negative or masculine electricity of the man is reversed, and becomes positive like that of the woman under excitement of alcoholic stimulants--in other words, for the time being, the man becomes a woman .... His attributes become feminine; he is irritable, irrational, excitable by trivialities, and when opposed in his opinions or conduct, becomes violent and outrageous, and if, in this mood, he meets his wife, whose normal condition of electricity is like his present condition, positive, they repel each other ....

The logical obverse, just exactly who drunk men would get attracted to while brimming with alcoholic feminine energy, Pleasonton passes over in tactful silence.

Scholars, to Pleasonton's dismay, did not start chucking out their copies of Newton, and barkeeps did not install galvanic batteries to keep their soused customers properly charged up. In fact, most scientific journals didn't bother to review or list his book at all; as is so often the case, serious scientists simply hoped that the obvious absurdities in it would make it go away.

The entire print run sold out.

Pleasonton's timing was fortuitous. Word of a medical study had just arrived from Italy: there, according to an April 22, 1876, article in Medical and Surgical Reporter, one Dr. Ponza had taken violent inmates at his lunatic asylum at Messandria and placed them in rooms painted either red, blue, or violet. The ones in the red rooms seethed with rage; the patients in the blue rooms recovered. And perhaps, one medical editor speculated, the color of light and inmate clothing chafed at them as sorely as any straitjacket. After all, he added confidently, some people could feel color: It is a fact that some persons can detect the color of a material by feeling it. Suppose such an one in an insane state irritated by contact with material of a color from which, as the result of a delusion, he has a special aversion: how his case must be retarded unless the very conditions of his mind are recognized, and he is bathed in light of a proper tint.

Such experiments gave Pleasonton's an added luster, no matter how bizarre his theories on electricity sounded--and it is debatable whether any readers even

bothered to read that section of his book--his experiments with blue light did seem to have some medical basis.

Indeed, days after Ponza's results were published in Europe, other asylums there followed suit; at the Kent County Asylum in England, one homicidal maniac was locked up into a "blue room" by the order of the asylum's superintendent, F. P. Davies, who reported:

The first day he was very noisy; he daubed the walls with feces and destroyed his clothes. At night the room was thoroughly cleansed, recolored, and the next day he was again put into it, and acted just as before. Toward evening, though, a change was noticed in him; he was quieter, and, upon being removed, asked not to be sent back there again. However ... he was put into it for the third time. About noon he begged to be let out of it, complaining of severe frontal headache .... From that time he has given us no trouble, and has exercised great control over himself.

The same day as the Medical and Surgical Reporter article on European experiments, as chance would have it, the New York Herald also decided to run an interview with Pleasonton that gave a glowing account of his blue light experiments with pigs. Articles from the Herald and other major New York newspapers, then as now, were often picked up by smaller local papers across the country.

Watching this blue light gospel spread, one scientific journal could hold its tongue no longer. On July 1, 1876, Scientific American sniffed that Pleasonton's book "is more eccentric than we could have believed ... beyond the sphere of legitimate criticism, and [we] place it among the many melancholy burlesques of science." And yet even as it sneered at the general's bizarre notions, it had published another article that seemed to demonstrate that blood was drawn into capillaries near the skin at different rates depending on the color of light used. And the most efficacious at imparting a healthy rosy glow to test subjects was ... blue light.