Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country from c.1890-1940. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s the social and personal meanings of colour(s). The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich mother-daughter and sibling relationships the generational transmission of trauma and experience transatlantic reflections and the struggle for creative expression. This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'.
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March 2023
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