THE SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE COLOR OF THE SKIN

Abstract

As Rowntree and Brown¹ have stated in a recent article, there is a pressing need in clinical medicine for a method of measuring and recording the color of the skin. A diversity of terms and descriptive expressions exists in clinical literature in the varied attempts to state the color of the skin and its changes during the progress of the treatment of the patients under observation. For example, various clinicians have recorded the color in polycythemia as being "red," "brick red," "congestive red," "reddish cyanosis" and even "cyanotic." Our knowledge of color and color vision is fundamentally inexact and as a result the language of color, while it may be beautiful, lacks precision. For there are myriads of shades of red from the faintest pink to the darkest red, and yet they are all to be classified as being reds. The terms ordinarily used to describe color do not connote