Radiology—Its Relation to Medicine

Abstract

Roentgen rays, or the x-ray, at their discovery only thirty-eight years ago, were looked upon by the medical profession as a scientific revelation that would enable a surgeon to study a broken bone, or to locate a needle or a nail that was buried in tissue. These rays exhibited a curious phenomenon that might be of value in the practice of surgery. How could they be utilized? Doctors were curious, but conservative. Ingenious instrumen-makers invented machines; mechanical minds were discovered among the profession itself; but this new force was recognized by doctors only to the extent of its photographic value in revealing foreign elements in various parts of the body. Early tragedies which occurred in the handling of this novel agency called attention to an additional power within the roentgen rays. Scientists studied the phenomenon. If x-ray destroyed healthy tissue, why, some thinkers suggested, could they not also destroy cancerous neoplasms? Roentgenology was developed; a new science was born. Three years after Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen discovered x-ray, Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium. But another three years passed before the action of radium on human tissue, and its value as a therapeutic agent, became known—when Professor Bacquerel, of Paris, unwarily carried a tube of radium in his waistcoat pocket and suffered a severe skin burn. Through careful study of the radio-active properties of these two agencies, the science of radiology was established. Roentgenology and radiology had been born; and physicians and surgeons—first the radicals and soon also the conservatives—were not slow to hail them as valuable diagnostic and therapeutic agencies. From the very beginning, the clinical use of radium and the therapeutic employment of the x-ray have been in the hands of licensed physicians; and although a few laymen were prominent in the purely technical or manipulatory phase of diagnostic roentgenology, the development of both the technic and the clinical application was the fruit of the enthusiastic and unselfish, even limb- and life-endangering, industrious labor of physicians. These physician-radiologists have laid their needs, and sometimes even the engineering plans, before the manufacturers, with the result that the latter have constantly devised improvements in equipment. It is a fact that most of the apparatus has been manufactured as a direct response to the expression of needs or problems by physicians practising radiology. This new science, which has been universally accepted by the medical profession because of its valuable diagnostic and therapeutic powers, now claims the attention of organized medicine for unqualified recognition as an important specialty.