Woloshyn offers an account of the visual culture of light therapy in Britain from its earliest modern developments in the 1890s to its deeply embedded medical and public presence by the 1930s. Her study is a significant addition to the somewhat limited body of literature on the British history of light therapy, and a valuable contribution to existing scholarship on visual and material cultures in histories of science and medicine (such as Carter's Rise and Shine: Sunlight, Technology and Health (2007), Jamieson’s ‘More than meets the eye: revealing the therapeutic potential of light, 1896–1910’, Social History of Medicine (2013) 26(4), pp. 715–737). The account centres on the role of images in the emergence and legitimization of light therapy, and draws on a rich variety of visual material, including before-and-after photographs of patients, documentary photographs of light clinics, advertisements and documentation, including charts, graphs and X-rays. Although these images are considered by Woloshyn as evidence of how light was conceptualized to act upon the body and viewed as actively contributing to definitions of light as a method of cure, the capriciousness and non-conformity of these images are also thought to communicate and contribute to medical practitioners’ ambivalent and competing perceptions of light therapy's benefits and risks.

The chapters of the book are each driven by an image, or a set of images and objects, used to lead a discussion on a specific theme in light therapy's history. The account begins with a supplement published by The Times in 1928 titled ‘Sunlight and health’, which is used as evidence both of the popularity of light therapy in Britain in the mid- to late 1920s, and of the multiplicity and instability of its meanings and applications. In Chapter 2, Woloshyn uses documentary photographs to trace the ambivalent role of sunburn in the dosage standardization of ultraviolet light, and the long-term desire of practitioners to establish light therapy as a ‘systematic’ form of medicine. Chapter 3 centres on damaged and overexposed photographic images to describe the complex and uneasy interaction between light therapy and its photographic representations. In Chapter 4, Woloshyn examines risk, damage and injury associated with light therapy as represented in print advertisements, and considers the continued use of infrared and ultraviolet rays in the context of the contemporaneous development of radiotherapy. Chapter 5 focuses on the politics and aesthetics of suntan, and investigates suntan as a visual marker of revitalized health and a troubling act of racial transgression during a period of heightened interest in eugenics. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the concept of the ‘dead point’ in light therapy practice (too deep a suntan that could inhibit further curative effect), which is used by Woloshyn as an opportunity to discuss other ‘silences’, ‘absences’ or ‘dead ends’ in the history of light therapy. She considers that all the images used in her account can be viewed as failures or dead points, unable to coherently communicate light therapy as a progressive and valuable treatment, but argues that these failed images are valuable in communicating the ambivalence and anxieties of medical practitioners in the promotion and application of light therapy.

Woloshyn has produced a thoroughly enjoyable and richly illustrated account of the visual culture of light therapy. Her study expertly demonstrates the salient use of images by medical practitioners and the challenges, as evidenced by those same images, to capture and regulate the effect of light on the body. I would suggest that some of her observations are too conceptually driven to be of immediate value to historians of medicine. For example, she proposes that as the ‘skin, eye, and film are photosensitive surfaces that were activated, transformed, and imprinted’ by the actinic light emitted by ultraviolet light lamps, we might consider the camera ‘as much a participant – even a patient’ – in light therapy (p. 111). However, such observations, in which the author collapses boundaries between means of representation and methods of cure, are also central to her account. For example, she discusses the various meanings of the verb ‘to fix’: ‘to fix a scientific principle or standard is “to secure” it or “to make (it) permanent”; to fix a broken leg is “to mend” it, “to set (it) right” or “to secure (its) position”; to fix an image is “to make (it) permanent” or “to secure” it’ (p. 68). These statements epitomize the ambiguity of medical practitioners’ desire to control and stabilize the imprint of light on photosensitive emulsion, and the related desire to secure a standard dose of ultraviolet radiation in the treatment of patients.

The book is highly recommended to historians of medicine, science and technology who wish to incorporate visual or material-culture methodologies into their work. It would also be of interest to anyone studying histories of light therapy or twentieth-century cultures of health and well-being.