This is a featured article for the topic medical photography.
In the late 19th century, British and American scientists investigating the radiation produced by an electrical discharge in a tube of gas at low pressure had noticed that photographic plates placed nearby became fogged. In England, William Crookes thought the plates were faulty and sent them back to Ilford. In the USA, W. Jennings and A. Goodspeed considered the phenomenon interesting enough to make the fogged materials worth keeping, but could not explain it. Then, on 8 November 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen in Würzburg noted that a discharge in a tube masked with black paper to block the escape of any visible light caused a surface coated with barium platinocide to fluoresce, and deduced that the discharge had produced radiation invisible to the eye.
The next stage involved photography. Röntgen found that this unknown radiation, provisionally labelled ‘X-rays’, affected a photographic plate through some materials but not others. On 20 November he created a first radiographic image of the metal fittings on his laboratory door. On 22 December he took the first picture of human bones photographed through flesh: the ringed hand of his wife Bertha. Between the end of December and the beginning of January 1896 Röntgen deposited a preliminary notice with the Würzburg Society of Medical Physics, sent copies to colleagues, and informed the Berlin Physical Society. His findings caused a considerable stir in the scientific community. During January 1896 the experiments, which were not in themselves particularly complicated, were replicated by scientists elsewhere: Toussaint Barthélemy and Paul Outin in France, for example, Alan Swinton in England, and Arthur Wright in the USA.
Medical scientists immediately recognized the significance of X-rays, which seemed to realize the age-old dream of seeing inside the intact, living body. The potential applications were many, including detection of fractures and internal abnormalities, location of metal objects such as bullets, and, after injecting opaque substances, observation of the circulatory and digestive systems in action. With Röntgen's discovery, photography seemed finally to have found a clinical application. Formerly used as a means of documentation, supplementing the inadequacies of visual memory, it now became an investigative tool in its own right, more powerful than the human eye. As early as 1896, some hospitals created radiographic departments, and in Paris only a few months after the discovery Albert Londe opened a laboratory at the Salpêtrière. Surprising, not to say fantastic, therapeutic properties were attributed to X-rays. Some doctors used them to treat skin diseases, others believed that they would soon be used against tuberculosis, or to eradicate certain bacteria. Some even thought that these rays that could make the invisible visible might be used to restore sight to the blind. By the end of the 19th century, in short, X-rays seemed to be a veritable panacea.
Outside scientific circles, they attracted an unusual degree of interest from the public at large. The press seized on them at an early stage. On 5 January 1896 the Viennese Die Presse announced Röntgen's discovery in a sensational article. On the 7th it was the turn of the German Frankfurter Zeitung and the British Standard, on the 8th the New York Sun. Readers were enthralled by the small number of accompanying images: the ringed hand, a compass, metal objects embedded in a piece of wood. One reason for this popular sensation was, of course, that the discovery seemed to promise the fulfilment of so many medical dreams. But these invisible rays, designated with the mathematical symbol for the unknown and undermining the boundaries between interior and exterior space, matched the public's taste for the fantastic, already whetted by 19th-century science fiction. Some clever operators organized X-ray sessions in fairground booths, sometimes alternating with demonstrations of that other 1895 novelty, the Lumière brothers' cinematograph. Meanwhile, cartoonists and sketch writers let their imaginations run riot, soon inevitably with visions of machines that could show clothed people naked. Later it was literature's turn, most notably Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (1924), in which the hero sees his flesh seemingly ‘disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved’ by the X-ray machine, and later, as a keepsake, gets a radiograph of his beloved's thorax: an unforgettable symbol of mortality and desire.
History soon acknowledged radiography's central role in the development of both medical science and physics, since it was while studying X-rays that Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) discovered radioactivity. But beyond the scientific domain, X-rays formed part of that vast reservoir of collective fantasy that was to nourish both popular culture (comics, pulp fiction, cinema) and the artistic avant-garde for much of the 20th century.
