Medicine: Photographic Tanning

At an unnamed beach summer before last an unnamed hypogonadal (undersexed) man lay down in “an abbreviated bathing suit of peculiar cut.” He lay there for seven broiling August afternoons and scarcely changed color.

The following January the pasty sun bather consulted Anatomist James B. Hamilton of Yale University School of Medicine and Dr. Gilbert Hubert of Albany Hospital, Albany, N. Y. The scientists examined him, began to treat him with male hormone substance. To their astonishment, “within three weeks there appeared, along with the bronzing of the face, a tanning of the body save where it had been protected. . . . The patient had not worn the bathing suit, whose peculiar pattern the tan fitted, or any other bathing suit for five months. Neither had he sunned himself or used a sunlamp. . . .” When hormone treatments were stopped the tan faded away.

“Tanning,” concluded the scientists, formulating in Science last week a convincing explanation of the action of sunlight on the skin, “may be a ‘photographic-like process’ of ‘exposure’ and ‘development,’ with the sex hormone acting to ‘develop’ color-lacking material laid down in the skin by exposure [to the sun]. . . . This ‘developing’ action may be exerted as late as five months after exposure.”