About Me
X rays were discovered accidentally on November 23, 1895, by the German physicist Willhelm Roentgen. Roentgen was working in a darkened room, trying to determine whether recently discovered cathode rays could travel through a glass vacuum tube. "Suddenly, about a yard from the tube," recounted Dr. Otto Glasser, Roentgen's biograper, "there was a weak light that shimmered on a little bench he knew was located nearby. It was as though a ray of light or a faint spark from the induction coil had been reflected by a mirror."
Roentgen published his first article on the phenomenon in late December 1895. By February of 1896 American physicists were using X rays in clinical medicine. One patient--a young boy named Eddie McCarthy--had a broken forearm X-rayed. A young New Yorker named Tolson Cunningham had a bullet removed from his leg after it was located with a forty-five minute X-ray exposure. Soon University of Pennsylvania professor Henry W. Cattell wrote in Science that "the manifold uses to which Roentgen's discovery may be applied in medicine are so obvious that it is even now questionable whether a surgeon would be morally justified in performing a certain class of operations without first having seen pictured by these rays the field of his work--a map, as it were, of the unknown country he is to explore."
Within months X rays were used to find a bullet in the brain of a twelve-year-old child, a severed drainage tube in a lung, and to photograph a broken hip joint. By the end of 1896 a Chicago electrical engineer named Wolfram C. Fuchs had performed more than fourteen hundred X-ray examinations, and doctors were regularly referring their patients to "specialists" with the simple, primitive machines they had bought or built themselves.
Not suprisingly the early X-ray pioneers had little understanding of the potential dangers of radiation. They rarely bothered to protect their patients or themselves from overexposure. Machine operators often tested their equipment by placing their hands--time and again--in the beam. With fluctuating power ratios and errant beams, doctors, patients, machine operators, and bystanders alike were exposed. The X rays could even penetrate walls and irradiate people in other rooms.
As the technology was refined and the equipment became more powerful, increasingly serious damage began to surface. A part-time machine demonstrator named H.D. Hawks was forced to quit his job after only four days because his hands began to redden and swell. The skin on his knuckles disintegrated from overexposure, fingernail growth halted, and the hair on exposed skin fell out. Hawks's problems were minor compared with those of Clarence Madison Dally, a glassblower at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory and the first American X-ray worker known to have been killed by X-ray exposure. Dally frequently tested the output of radiation tubes by placing his hands directly in the beam. Though he was severely burned in 1896, Dally continued X-ray work for two more years. In 1902 his right arm was amputated at the shoulder to arrest the spread of skin cancer; two years later his left arm was amputated for the same reason. Dally died that October, prompting Edison to discontine radiation research in his laboratory. By the 1930s so many people had fallen victim to the misuse of X rays than an entire book (entitled American Martyrs to Science Through the Roentgen Rays) was published by Dr. Percy Brown, a Boston radiologist who himself died of cancer in 1950.
