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Ulrich first tested the idea in the early 1980s, when he was a young professor at the University of Delaware. At Paoli Hospital in suburban Philadelphia, it happened that for nine years, patients recovering from gall bladder surgery had been randomly assigned to otherwise identical hospital rooms whose window views consisted of either a stand of trees or a brown brick wall. Ulrich examined the medical records of 46 of those patients. He reported in the journal Science that patients who viewed trees were discharged almost a day earlier, on average, than those who saw walls, and they took fewer strong doses of pain-relieving narcotics.Since that groundbreaking work was published in 1984, other scientists have shown that views of greenery or even simple sunlight can ease pain in patients recovering from surgery. Even landscape art, sometimes combined with nature sounds, can ease the pain in hospital patients undergoing bronchoscopy, endoscopy and cardiac catheterization.
Exposure to nature's sights and sounds can even ease physical symptoms. A few years ago, Ulrich and his colleagues found that blood donors who watched a nature videotape for five minutes in the clinic waiting room had lower blood pressure and pulse rates than those who watched daytime television. He doesn't comment on what this result says about daytime television.
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