Robert Reid Newell

Abstract

For several decades starting in the 1920s, speakers at national radiology meetings were accustomed to a tall, balding man sitting in the front row and peering intently at them. Pinned to his jacket was a plastic device with wires leading to his ears. The device was an early hearing aid. The intent peering was lip reading, and the man was Robert Reid Newell, for 45 years a radiologist at Stanford University. He had been deaf since childhood, but he had not let that impediment prevent him from attaining the status of a world leader in radiology.