JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post--History of Dots series
In the long line of the history of "firsts" in photography are a number of sub-categories, and subs- to those subs, an example of which is scene in the pages of Scientific American for 1896. Here we have the history of photography=>medical photography=>clinical applications of X-rays=>X-ray photographs=>X-ray photographs of gunshots, or some such thing. Anyway, here in the March 21 1896 issue of the great magazine is one of two articles on the X-ray, the second of which features what may be one of the very earliest--if not the earliest--images made of a human limb peppered with rifle/field canon pellets. This comes only two months or so following the discovery and first imagery using X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen (1845-1923) made November 8 1895, the experimental results published soon after on January 8 1896 in his paper "Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen" in the Würzburg Physico-Medical Society.
The interest in X-rays was spectacular, with more than 1000 papers published on the subject in 1896 alone. This is understandable given the revolutionary nature of the announcement plus the relative ease and simplicity of equipment necessary to produce results. The Roentgen paper was translated and printed in Nature (for the first time in English) almost immediately on January 23 1896, and it was the very next issue in which advertisements appeared for the relatively cheap necessaries (Crookes tubes etc.) for interested parties to produce their own X-rays at home. Absolutely everyone was interested in this discovery. (For the Scientific American there were 9 articles on the X-ray for January-June, 1896, with the first appearing on February 3; for July-December there were 33.)
The image below was made by Columbia University's Michael Pupin, and was one of the earliest general clinical uses of the new discovery, following what was probably the first medical use (at least in the U.S.) by Frank Austin (Dartmouth) in February 1896. The extraordinary development had an epochal impact on medicine, as now for the first time in the history of the planet a person could see inside a person/living being without cutting them open and poking around. The X-ray was soon put into use on the battlefield six months later, at about the same time that some of the pioneers (E. Thomson, Morton, Tesla) began to report exposure burns (as some of their photographic exposures using X-rays were 20 minutes long...)
(By the way this is the man for whom Pupin Hall was named--this place became ultra famous in my mind, anyway, for the seminal work done their in cutting edge areas by Peagram and Fermi and Urey and Rabi and Dunning, among many others. Also Pupin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924 for his scientific memoir/autobiography, a highly unusual feat for such a subject.)
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