330 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE friends and partners in the promotion of the domestic chemical in dustry. After 1919, Garvan worked primarily through the Chemical Foundation, a nonprofit corporation established to administer con fiscated German patents. The foundation funneled money into re search and political lobbying to benefit chemical education and the domestic industry. In 1926, Herty left SOCMA to become a consul tant for the Chemical Foundation. During his association with the foundation, he started his last great project: the development of a southern paper and pulp industry. With partial funding from the foundation, Herty established and operated a research center in Sa vannah to develop technologies that were commercially viable when employing the products of southern forests. The Herty papers at Emory University are rich and extremely com plete, which lends Reed’s book both its greatest weakness and its greatest strength. On the downside, the amount of detail Reed has included can be overwhelming, and editorial pruning would have improved the readability of the work. More positively, in this first biography of Herty, Reed was able to mine several decades of corre spondence to create a thorough account of an important man who left his mark on American chemistry and the chemical industry. Kathryn Steen Dr. Steen teaches the history of technology at Drexel University. She is complet ing a book on the history of the U.S. synthetic organic chemical industry. Naked, to the Bone: MedicalImaging in the Twentieth Century. By Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii+378; illustrations, notes, index. $35.95 (cloth). On 8 November 1895, a middle-aged German physicist manipu lating a Crookes tube in a darkened laboratory noticed a strange fluorescence on a coated cardboard screen lying a few feet away. Although the physicist knew that such tubes would glow when suffi ciently charged with current, he had carefully covered the glass with black cardboard to suppress any internal luminescence. Understand ably astonished by the screen’s inexplicable glow, the physicist began to experiment with it. For much of the next seven weeks, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen remained alone in the darkened laboratory, test ing the capabilities of the tube’s strange emission. When on 22 December Roentgen at last invited his wife to join him in the laboratory, he laid her left hand on a photographic plate and exposed it to the charged tube. The resulting print of Bertha Roentgen’s skeletal hand shocked the Würzberg Physico-Medical Society when Roentgen published it in their Proceedings on 28 De cember. A Viennese newspaper recognized the power of the physi cist’s “new kind of rays” and published an account of the discovery TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 331 (along with the arresting radiograph of Frau Roentgen’s hand) on 5January 1896. News ofthe “X-ray” spread quickly across the globe. The world, argues Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, would never be the same. In a well-written and thoroughly researched book, Kevles recounts the “revolution” (p. 5) in medical imaging augured by Roentgen’s 1895 discovery. A contribution to the Sloan Foundation’s Technol ogy Series, Naked to the Bone seeks to convey the significance of this revolution to the general reader. Spanning one hundred years and encompassing techniques as diverse as ultrasound, magnetic reso nance imaging, and positron emission tomography, Kevles traces physicians’ increasing commitment to visualizing the interior of the living body. The narrative weaves fluent technical explanations with captivating descriptions ofthe institutions, individuals, and attitudes that made these innovations possible. Using examples from patient histories and physicians’ own accounts, Kevles explicates the trans formations in diagnosis, surgery, and prenatal care made possible by medical imaging technologies. Yet, as Kevles emphasizes, the ability to see beneath the surface of the skin affected more than medical knowledge and patient care. In myriad social realms, new imaging technologies challenged deeply held distinctions between invisible and visible, interior and exterior, and private and public. Focusing on changes in the United States, with occasional forays into British or French material, Kevles describes the use of imaging technologies in sites such as the court room, the factory, and the art museum. She also discusses develop ments in...