Dinshah P. Ghadiali is perhaps one of the foremost quacks in medical history, not coincidentally he is also the inventor of a peculiar device known as the Spectro-Chrome. According to Dinshah’s own accounts, he began school at the age of two, finished high school by 10, and became an associate professor in Mathematics in his native Bombay College by 11. Unsatisfied by these academic accomplishments Dinshah turned to medicine at the ripe old age of 14.

It was his latest passion which gave birth to Dinshah’s enduring fascination with chromotherapy. Dinshah’s accounts of this period, reveal a story in which he supposedly cured a girl young girl dying of colitis within three days by exposing her to indigo-colored light filtered through a kerosene lamp. Inspired by this success, Dinshah set up a whole medical practice based around the concept. In 1933 he published a book which is considered to be the foundation of all chromotherapy today; it was entitled the “Spectrochromemetry Encyclopedia”.

According to this volume, every vital element in the human body (oxygen, nitrogen, carbon) consists of a mixture of red, blue and yellow light. While these lights are balanced within healthy people, they fall out of balance when disease or illness strikes. To assist in the correction of these imbalances, Dinshah developed his Spectro-Chrome, a simple box equipped with a 100-watt bulb and several colored filters. According to Dinshah this device could be used to heal any ailment short of a broken bone.

Dinshah’s tall claims were soon challenged by the American Medical Association, who dubbed the aspiring physician a fraud and charlatan. To escape the threat of legal censure, Dinshah cunningly changed the language of his treatments, now claiming to normalate patients, and restore their equilibrium rather than treat them.

However, Dinshah’s scams didn’t help him to evade the law for much longer.  By 1931 Dinshah was in jail on charges of Grand Larceny after a former student complained to authorities regarding the ineffectiveness of Dinshah’s device. The court proceedings which followed were something of a spectacle. Many of the defendants that Dinshah called to argue in his favor turned out to be completely ineffectual. A paralyzed man he claimed to have treated successfully was shown to be unable to walk, while a supposedly cured epileptic broke into seizures in the midst of his testimony.

“In previous monographs, you learned that the aura is closely related to the psychic body and to the Vital Life Force animating all the cells of our being. This is why it is a permanent reflection of the state of our health and why it reveals any momentary energy imbalances that we may be experiencing.”

After this exhaustive examination of color therapies across time, tell me does this fact stand out as a definitive truth or a shaky opinion at best? Nevertheless, let us give Rosicrucian Order  AMORC the benefit of the doubt and examine what they have to say about diagnosing and curing illness through color in the experiments that follow.