Advances in radiology

A simplified diagram of a water-cooled X-ray tube

In 1895, Thomas Edison investigated materials' ability to fluoresce when exposed to X-rays, and found that calcium tungstatewas the most effective substance. Around March 1896, the fluoroscope he developed became the standard for medical X-ray examinations. Nevertheless, Edison dropped X-ray research around 1903, even before the death of Clarence Madison Dally, one of his glassblowers. Dally had a habit of testing X-ray tubes on his hands, and acquired a cancer in them so tenacious that both arms were amputated in a futile attempt to save his life.

In 1901, U.S. President William McKinley was shot twice in an assassination attempt. While one bullet only grazed his sternum, another had lodged somewhere deep inside his abdomen and could not be found. "A worried McKinley aide sent word to inventor Thomas Edison to rush an X-ray machine to Buffalo to find the stray bullet. It arrived but wasn't used." While the shooting itself had not been lethal, "gangrene had developed along the path of the bullet, and McKinley died of septic shockdue to bacterial infection" six days later.^[74]

The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on 11 January 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate.^[75] On 14 February 1896 Hall-Edwards was also the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation.^[76] In early 1896, several weeks after Röntgen's discovery, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that the rays "not only photograph, but also affect the living function".^[77]

The first medical X-ray made in the United States was obtained using a discharge tube of Pulyui's design. In January 1896, on reading of Röntgen's discovery, Frank Austin of Dartmouth College tested all of the discharge tubes in the physics laboratory and found that only the Pulyui tube produced X-rays. This was a result of Pulyui's inclusion of an oblique "target" of mica, used for holding samples of fluorescent material, within the tube. On 3 February 1896 Gilman Frost, professor of medicine at the college, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy, whom Gilman had treated some weeks earlier for a fracture, to the X-rays and collected the resulting image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates obtained from Howard Langill, a local photographer also interested in Röntgen's work.^[23]

Dangers

With the widespread experimentation with x‑rays after their discovery in 1895 by scientists, physicians, and inventors came many stories of burns, hair loss, and worse in technical journals of the time. In February 1896, Professor John Daniel and Dr. William Lofland Dudley of Vanderbilt University reported hair loss after Dr. Dudley was X-rayed. A child who had been shot in the head was brought to the Vanderbilt laboratory in 1896. Before trying to find the bullet an experiment was attempted, for which Dudley "with his characteristic devotion to science"^[78][79][80] volunteered. Daniel reported that 21 days after taking a picture of Dudley's skull(with an exposure time of one hour), he noticed a bald spot 2 inches (5.1 cm) in diameter on the part of his head nearest the X-ray tube: "A plate holder with the plates towards the side of the skull was fastened and a coin placed between the skull and the head. The tube was fastened at the other side at a distance of one-half inch from the hair."^[81]

In August 1896 Dr. H/D. Hawks, a graduate of Columbia College, suffered severe hand and chest burns from an x-ray demonstration. It was reported in Electrical Review and led to many other reports of problems associated with x-rays being sent in to the publication.^[82] Many experimenters including Elihu Thomson at Edison's lab, William J. Morton, and Nikola Tesla also reported burns. Elihu Thomson deliberately exposed a finger to an x-ray tube over a period of time and suffered pain, swelling, and blistering.^[83] Other effects were sometime blamed for the damage including ultraviolet rays and (according to Tesla) ozone.^[84] Many physicians claimed there were no effects from x-ray exposure at all.^[83]

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 814