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Spring color
J. Cluoa Dis Vol. 40, No. Printed
in Great
Britain.
4, pp. 357-359, 1987 All rights reserved
Copyright
0
0021-9681/87 1987 Pergamon
$3.00 +O.OO
Journals Ltd
Second Thoughts SPRING
COLOR
RICHARD V. LEE Department of Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Buffalo and State University of New York at Buffalo, NY 14222, U.S.A. (Received 3 July 1986)
By April-tax-time the tulips are in bloom. For the next month these brilliant soldiers of spring brighten the gardens that for six months have lain quiet and colorless. The varieties of spring bulbs march through their flowering, delighting the eye, announcing the arrival of the season of color. The stark winter contrasts and drab, suspended, cold nature are driven off by the scarlet, blue, yellow and orange of tulips, hyacinths, anemones, crocuses, and the luminous green of new plants and new leaves. Spirits soar, no longer winter confined to the comfort of woodstove and rocking chair and library. The urge to dig, to plant, to watch the spring color emerge, is irresistible. Color is an alluring, potent attractant. There is a popular notion that the world is intrinsically a gloriously colorful spectacle. It is a notion that I have promoted by proudly displaying photographs of scintillating sunsets and sunrises and flowers, taking friends for autumn foliage flights over the hills of Western New York, and encouraging our children to become familiar with the iridescent creatures of the coral reef. It is a notion fostered by color television and color printing. It has begun to dawn on me that brilliant hues and mind tingling displays of color are the exception, not the rule, in nature. Most of the earth is pretty dull and colorless. The Amazon Rain Forest, the deserts of northern Kenya, the Great Plains, the Alaskan tundra, the high Tibetan plateau, and the western mountains of North and South America are remarkable for the paucity of contrasting bright colors. As a pilot and hiker and diver one sees the 351
world in different light and lights. Large numbers of animals and plant species rely upon the camouflage of colorlessness for their survival. The rain forests and the evergreen forests become dull green seas when viewed from a light airplane. The high or dry flat country is a mind numbing gray or brown. There are startling contrasts of brightness and texture but there is little that might be called color. The eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains viewed from 11,000 feet during the late autumn reveals gray-brown plains and foothills ribbed by erosion from the melt run off, patches of dark evergreens, the black or gray of bare rock, and the white glare of snow on the ridges and peaks. A patch of yellow from a stand of tamaracks brightens the scenery only occasionally. In this country, red is almost always a sign of human intrusion. In the abyss of the ocean, the desiccation of the desert, and the constant moisture of the tundra, grays, beiges, and subtle pastels blending into backgrounds of black, white, and blue are the dominant tints. To be sure, there are pockets of color and flashes of iridescence: rainbows, sunrises, the aurora borealis, humming birds, parrot fish, birds of paradise, and human beings. In some places the earth’s surface is lit by the ochre of iron ore. At times the water is touched by the brilliance of an algal “red tide.” But on balance, most of the world around us is nothing like the photographers of the National Geographic Society and countless collections of color illustrated magazines and oversized books would have us believe. Colorful extravagances in nature are as
358
Second Thoughts
unusual as the capacity to perceive them. Colorful contrasts are exclusively the privilege of creatures touched by light. To have color, there must be light, and there must be organs sensitive to the different wave lengths of light that determine color. Creatures that live beyond light have no color; some have no eyes. For much of the earth, much of the time, what living things sense are gradations of brightness and darkness. The majority of the earth’s creatures lack color vision. The ability to see color is found only in the primates, and a few insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Despite the paucity of colorfulness and the uniqueness of color perception, life flourishes best in the light. The energy of sunlight fires the furnaces of living protoplasm. The energy food chain of this planet is dependent upon substances that can trap the energy of the sunlight and transform it ultimately into those marvelous things we call cells and colors. Despite the colorless monotony of much of the world to most of its inhabitants, energy-capturing chemicals, pigments like chlorophyll, are fundamental components in the evolution of earthly life. Caves and the pelagic abyss are sparsely inhabited by pallid creatures lacking pigment and color sensitive organs. In the flamboyant world of sunlight, muted creatures propagate and prosper. For nature, as opposed to culture, color is both essential and subtle. In truth the wearisome dull green of the Amazon Rain Forest is not an affront to the color hungry human eye but a manifestation of biologic success. Color is so rare, so precious for colorconsuming creatures, that highly prized stones and metals of the earth are those with color: gold, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise, and even diamonds. The delight of gardeners, bees and butterflies is a brilliantly colored flower. The encyclopedia definition of color is “a term designating the composition of electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye.” The anthropocentricity of the definition highlights the specialness of color. We describe eccentric characters as “colorful.” Newspapers Musicians strive for report “local color.” “color” in their composition and performance. To be called colorless is a cutting critical comment. Color has come to imply bright hues, sharp contrasts, and insouciant flamboyance. The contemporary idea of color is epitomized by the overabundant, jangling, ostentatious
neon lights of Las Vegas sticking out of place, in the sere, dull desert. Las Vegas vividly demonstrates the human addiction to color. Human beings are color freaks. The human quest for color has caused illness. The great 18th century Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, suffered episodes of neurologic disasterseizures, dementia, paresis, tinnitus, and depression-several times during his life. The first episode at age 32 left him permanently deaf. His artistic vision was equally drastically changed. Goya’s work became grotesque, anguished, scourgingly unforgiving of human and biologic frailty. Like most painters of the time he ground and mixed his own pigments and paints which at the time were lead and mercury based. Goya used enormous quantities of lead white in his priming and painting which is responsible for the characteristic luminosity of his works. Moreover, Goya was an inspired, furious genius who would complete paintings with startling rapidity. Here was a genius who ground his lead and mercury pigments, mixed them in solvents and splashed and applied his paints with frenetic abandon. It has been estimated that Goya probably absorbed two to three times as much lead as other painters, most of whom Barnard0 Ramazzini observed in his book, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (1700), were poisoned by lead. Presumably it is lead to which we can attribute both the illness and the inspiration of Goya. Every group of human animals cherishes and uses color. Clothes and body paint and cosmetics color our bodies and travel with nomads. Sessile populations color the environment as well. Houses are painted. Gardens with colorful flowers are cultivated. Inside, humankind has colored the walls of caves and temples and houses with breathtaking paintings. The caves of Lascaux and Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibit our ancient and abiding penchant for color. Even the functional black and white of the written and printed page can be decorated. Look at magnificent illuminated medieval manuscripts or modern anatomy atlases. Color symbolizes states of being. The depressed and the lovelorn sing and feel the blues. Red is universally a happy color. Wearing red brings good luck. In every tribal group I personally know infants and toddlers have red in their dress to protect them from the malignities that carry off the young, the future of the tribe. White is the symbol of purity in life
Second
Thoughts
and at death. Colors sooth, elate, and distress their perceivers. Colors can mark territorial, aesthetic, and political boundaries that are useful for biologic and cultural evolution and which may be enormously difficult to transcend. Homo sapiens is the only earthly creature that intentionally, intently, makes and dispenses color. Modern medicine defies this urge. Modern medicine has striven for chromatic obscurity. Much of medical life occurs in sterile pallor: white coats, bleached and sanitized examining and operating rooms, bland and muffled corridors. The appearance of muted asepsis, I suppose, is meant to convey quiet competence. Yet the living anatomy exposed in operating theaters slashes scarlet against the dull graygreen drapes and scrub gowns. The academic hood of medicine is radiant green. Like the bouquets of flowers in our patients’ rooms, our academic hood is another residual of the ancient connection between the healing crafts and the garden, between man and nature. Jacob Bronowski in his lecture/essay, “The Speaking Eye, The Visionary Ear,” [l] remarked, We use the eye most of the time in order to get information about the natural world; we use the ear most of the time in order to get experience of people. We learn most about people through the ear. We learn most about nature through the eye.
Of course he was talking about the world of art and literature, not the world of medicine and the biology of humankind. Bronowski avoids the color of human biology because he assumes
359
that human beings are apart from nature. Humanity is part of nature and physicians need both eyes and ears to learn about people and their ailments. One needs visionary eyes to see the color of human life. The color blindness of much of contemporary medicine implies the Bronowskian dichotomy. Our medical buildings are neutral and sanitary, our images are black and white radiographs, electrocardiographs, and sonographs. A current fad in the criticism of medicine emphasizes words and the ear: doctors are accused of being poor listeners and poor communicators and so physicians are said to lack humanity and humanism. As if, as Jacob Bronowski would imply, the essence of humanity is hearing and speech, not colors and the eye. I suspect my concern has more to do with the implications of colorless medicine. Doctors and patients have become segregated from nature. Colorful medicine is considered inappropriate, illness is considered unnatural. Bronowski ignores the importance of the doctors’ inquiring eye, doctors ignore Bronowski’s visionary eye. Neither posture can accurately assess the world of nature or the world of man. Just as the antidote to winter’s cold is the warmth of spring color, so the response to medical critics should be some color in medicine’s cheeks. REFERENCE I.
Bronowski J: The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978
in Great
Britain.
4, pp. 357-359, 1987 All rights reserved
Copyright
0
0021-9681/87 1987 Pergamon
$3.00 +O.OO
Journals Ltd
Second Thoughts SPRING
COLOR
RICHARD V. LEE Department of Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Buffalo and State University of New York at Buffalo, NY 14222, U.S.A. (Received 3 July 1986)
By April-tax-time the tulips are in bloom. For the next month these brilliant soldiers of spring brighten the gardens that for six months have lain quiet and colorless. The varieties of spring bulbs march through their flowering, delighting the eye, announcing the arrival of the season of color. The stark winter contrasts and drab, suspended, cold nature are driven off by the scarlet, blue, yellow and orange of tulips, hyacinths, anemones, crocuses, and the luminous green of new plants and new leaves. Spirits soar, no longer winter confined to the comfort of woodstove and rocking chair and library. The urge to dig, to plant, to watch the spring color emerge, is irresistible. Color is an alluring, potent attractant. There is a popular notion that the world is intrinsically a gloriously colorful spectacle. It is a notion that I have promoted by proudly displaying photographs of scintillating sunsets and sunrises and flowers, taking friends for autumn foliage flights over the hills of Western New York, and encouraging our children to become familiar with the iridescent creatures of the coral reef. It is a notion fostered by color television and color printing. It has begun to dawn on me that brilliant hues and mind tingling displays of color are the exception, not the rule, in nature. Most of the earth is pretty dull and colorless. The Amazon Rain Forest, the deserts of northern Kenya, the Great Plains, the Alaskan tundra, the high Tibetan plateau, and the western mountains of North and South America are remarkable for the paucity of contrasting bright colors. As a pilot and hiker and diver one sees the 351
world in different light and lights. Large numbers of animals and plant species rely upon the camouflage of colorlessness for their survival. The rain forests and the evergreen forests become dull green seas when viewed from a light airplane. The high or dry flat country is a mind numbing gray or brown. There are startling contrasts of brightness and texture but there is little that might be called color. The eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains viewed from 11,000 feet during the late autumn reveals gray-brown plains and foothills ribbed by erosion from the melt run off, patches of dark evergreens, the black or gray of bare rock, and the white glare of snow on the ridges and peaks. A patch of yellow from a stand of tamaracks brightens the scenery only occasionally. In this country, red is almost always a sign of human intrusion. In the abyss of the ocean, the desiccation of the desert, and the constant moisture of the tundra, grays, beiges, and subtle pastels blending into backgrounds of black, white, and blue are the dominant tints. To be sure, there are pockets of color and flashes of iridescence: rainbows, sunrises, the aurora borealis, humming birds, parrot fish, birds of paradise, and human beings. In some places the earth’s surface is lit by the ochre of iron ore. At times the water is touched by the brilliance of an algal “red tide.” But on balance, most of the world around us is nothing like the photographers of the National Geographic Society and countless collections of color illustrated magazines and oversized books would have us believe. Colorful extravagances in nature are as
358
Second Thoughts
unusual as the capacity to perceive them. Colorful contrasts are exclusively the privilege of creatures touched by light. To have color, there must be light, and there must be organs sensitive to the different wave lengths of light that determine color. Creatures that live beyond light have no color; some have no eyes. For much of the earth, much of the time, what living things sense are gradations of brightness and darkness. The majority of the earth’s creatures lack color vision. The ability to see color is found only in the primates, and a few insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Despite the paucity of colorfulness and the uniqueness of color perception, life flourishes best in the light. The energy of sunlight fires the furnaces of living protoplasm. The energy food chain of this planet is dependent upon substances that can trap the energy of the sunlight and transform it ultimately into those marvelous things we call cells and colors. Despite the colorless monotony of much of the world to most of its inhabitants, energy-capturing chemicals, pigments like chlorophyll, are fundamental components in the evolution of earthly life. Caves and the pelagic abyss are sparsely inhabited by pallid creatures lacking pigment and color sensitive organs. In the flamboyant world of sunlight, muted creatures propagate and prosper. For nature, as opposed to culture, color is both essential and subtle. In truth the wearisome dull green of the Amazon Rain Forest is not an affront to the color hungry human eye but a manifestation of biologic success. Color is so rare, so precious for colorconsuming creatures, that highly prized stones and metals of the earth are those with color: gold, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise, and even diamonds. The delight of gardeners, bees and butterflies is a brilliantly colored flower. The encyclopedia definition of color is “a term designating the composition of electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye.” The anthropocentricity of the definition highlights the specialness of color. We describe eccentric characters as “colorful.” Newspapers Musicians strive for report “local color.” “color” in their composition and performance. To be called colorless is a cutting critical comment. Color has come to imply bright hues, sharp contrasts, and insouciant flamboyance. The contemporary idea of color is epitomized by the overabundant, jangling, ostentatious
neon lights of Las Vegas sticking out of place, in the sere, dull desert. Las Vegas vividly demonstrates the human addiction to color. Human beings are color freaks. The human quest for color has caused illness. The great 18th century Spanish artist, Francisco Goya, suffered episodes of neurologic disasterseizures, dementia, paresis, tinnitus, and depression-several times during his life. The first episode at age 32 left him permanently deaf. His artistic vision was equally drastically changed. Goya’s work became grotesque, anguished, scourgingly unforgiving of human and biologic frailty. Like most painters of the time he ground and mixed his own pigments and paints which at the time were lead and mercury based. Goya used enormous quantities of lead white in his priming and painting which is responsible for the characteristic luminosity of his works. Moreover, Goya was an inspired, furious genius who would complete paintings with startling rapidity. Here was a genius who ground his lead and mercury pigments, mixed them in solvents and splashed and applied his paints with frenetic abandon. It has been estimated that Goya probably absorbed two to three times as much lead as other painters, most of whom Barnard0 Ramazzini observed in his book, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (1700), were poisoned by lead. Presumably it is lead to which we can attribute both the illness and the inspiration of Goya. Every group of human animals cherishes and uses color. Clothes and body paint and cosmetics color our bodies and travel with nomads. Sessile populations color the environment as well. Houses are painted. Gardens with colorful flowers are cultivated. Inside, humankind has colored the walls of caves and temples and houses with breathtaking paintings. The caves of Lascaux and Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibit our ancient and abiding penchant for color. Even the functional black and white of the written and printed page can be decorated. Look at magnificent illuminated medieval manuscripts or modern anatomy atlases. Color symbolizes states of being. The depressed and the lovelorn sing and feel the blues. Red is universally a happy color. Wearing red brings good luck. In every tribal group I personally know infants and toddlers have red in their dress to protect them from the malignities that carry off the young, the future of the tribe. White is the symbol of purity in life
Second
Thoughts
and at death. Colors sooth, elate, and distress their perceivers. Colors can mark territorial, aesthetic, and political boundaries that are useful for biologic and cultural evolution and which may be enormously difficult to transcend. Homo sapiens is the only earthly creature that intentionally, intently, makes and dispenses color. Modern medicine defies this urge. Modern medicine has striven for chromatic obscurity. Much of medical life occurs in sterile pallor: white coats, bleached and sanitized examining and operating rooms, bland and muffled corridors. The appearance of muted asepsis, I suppose, is meant to convey quiet competence. Yet the living anatomy exposed in operating theaters slashes scarlet against the dull graygreen drapes and scrub gowns. The academic hood of medicine is radiant green. Like the bouquets of flowers in our patients’ rooms, our academic hood is another residual of the ancient connection between the healing crafts and the garden, between man and nature. Jacob Bronowski in his lecture/essay, “The Speaking Eye, The Visionary Ear,” [l] remarked, We use the eye most of the time in order to get information about the natural world; we use the ear most of the time in order to get experience of people. We learn most about people through the ear. We learn most about nature through the eye.
Of course he was talking about the world of art and literature, not the world of medicine and the biology of humankind. Bronowski avoids the color of human biology because he assumes
359
that human beings are apart from nature. Humanity is part of nature and physicians need both eyes and ears to learn about people and their ailments. One needs visionary eyes to see the color of human life. The color blindness of much of contemporary medicine implies the Bronowskian dichotomy. Our medical buildings are neutral and sanitary, our images are black and white radiographs, electrocardiographs, and sonographs. A current fad in the criticism of medicine emphasizes words and the ear: doctors are accused of being poor listeners and poor communicators and so physicians are said to lack humanity and humanism. As if, as Jacob Bronowski would imply, the essence of humanity is hearing and speech, not colors and the eye. I suspect my concern has more to do with the implications of colorless medicine. Doctors and patients have become segregated from nature. Colorful medicine is considered inappropriate, illness is considered unnatural. Bronowski ignores the importance of the doctors’ inquiring eye, doctors ignore Bronowski’s visionary eye. Neither posture can accurately assess the world of nature or the world of man. Just as the antidote to winter’s cold is the warmth of spring color, so the response to medical critics should be some color in medicine’s cheeks. REFERENCE I.
Bronowski J: The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978