Red vests
Sir: Anthony Daniels's examination of alternative medicine ('Why I don't feel well', 20 September) mentions the advice given in The Seven Levels of Healing, 'wear red underclothes'. Forty years ago, in Nigeria, a colonial police superintendent asked me about the perils of tropical sunshine. 'Why is it', he asked, 'that when I first came out to Africa I was ordered to wear a sun-helmet, or sofa topi, and now I see these wartime troops on active service, taking no such precautions? Why don't they get sunstroke? Our Bombay bowlers always had a red lining, to protect us from the sun.' The red lining was supposed to filter off theoretical 'actinic' rays, which were supposed to strike right through the helmet to the brain, causing sunstroke. The theory is based on 19th-century photo- graphy, with its use of red light filters to protect photosensitive materials from `acti- nic rays', as the photographers called them.
I tried to explain this to the police officer, but he was not receptive. 'When I was first appointed to Tanganyika in the 1920s,' he said, 'my superintendent told me to wear my red-lined helmet whenever out of doors, from morning to sundown, and for further protection, to wear a red vest beneath my shirt.' As a new boy, he took his experienced officer's advice. 'Of course, I don't regularly wear one now,' said my friend, 'but I still have one and if I feel a bit off-colour, I put it on, and I feel better.'
In theory, this would seem to be a prophylactic rather than the therapeutic use of red underclothes cited by Anthony Daniels, but my policeman seemed to use it for therapy as well. I don't think he had any other views about coloured rays. If he used purple for his headaches, it certainly had not been an effective slimming aid. Trewavas Eddy
Colonial Medical Service retd, 33 Brunswick Street West, Hove, Sussex
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