![]() ![]() Medical practitioners would need more experience and training before they became competent to reliably read the exotic images and distinguish between normal and pathological appearances. Mastering X-ray technology was not enough, though. Rapid improvements in the infant technology soon allowed for ever shorter exposures and increasingly better imaging. Many X-ray pioneers would die of painful debilitating cancers before the danger was recognized and protective measures taken. Morton did note that, after prolonged X-ray sessions, his eyes often got sore and his eyelids were often inflamed. No precautions were taken against radiation exposure: no one suspected the dangers involved. ![]() The only reliable way to calibrate the rays’ penetrating power was for the operator to inspect his own hand against the fluoroscope screen (opposite). If the rays were too “soft,” they barely passed through the skin if too “hard,” they passed through the thickest bones and produced little contrast on the photographic plate. The complex relations between the electrical apparatus and the properties of the rays it emitted were far from understood in 1896. ![]() It quickly became popular among doctors, surgeons, dentists, and others who were contemplating the addition of an X-ray apparatus to their laboratory or office. Hammer, Morton’s little green book describes the electrical apparatus and photographic techniques essential to X-ray photography. Written with the help of the electrical engineer Edwin W. 54 Selected figures from The X ray or Photography of the Invisible and Its Value in Surgery, 1896 Much of the operator’s expertise lay in knowing his tubes by heart and choosing the right one for the task. The complicated interactions between the electrical characteristics of the tube, its gas pressure, and the properties of the rays it emitted were not well understood. a rack on the wall holds spare gas tubes. The large flat disk in front of the table is the power control, made of an adjustable resistor. The apparatus in early X-ray photography: a huge induction coil (on the table against the wall) provides high voltage to drive the rays in a partially evacuated gas tube behind it, in the back corner, a motor-operated interrupter repeatedly breaks the direct current supply to create magnetic-field changes for induction. Half a century later, it was his son’s turn to demonstrate, to the medical profession and the public, a miraculous technology-the magical powers of new rays that could look into the human body without cutting it open. Morton (1819–68), in a September 1846 tooth extraction had famously demonstrated the magical powers of anesthesia, a miraculous technology that would revolutionize surgery. Morton was the professor of “Diseases of the Mind and Nervous System and Electro-Therapeutics” in the New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital and one of the first American physicians to experiment with the new rays. Physicists rushed to experiment with the new rays that seemed unrefractable and indifferent to electromagnetic fields, while other investigators attempted to use them to capture all kinds of objects previously hidden from the human eye-from hearts and bones to thoughts and souls. Almost overnight the mysterious rays and their eerie images began to circulate not only in scientific and medical journals but also in newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, stories, songs, and cartoons. The news of a strange kind of radiation that defied all standing theories of light and matter-and enabled people to see through opaque objects-had generated worldwide excitement. Morton (1845–1920) hurried this book, The X ray or Photography of the Invisible and Its Value in Surgery, into print in September 1896, a mere nine months after Wilhelm Röntgen made public his discovery of the new ray. This figure displays the first-ever outline of an infant’s liver, within its natural surroundings of flesh and bones. But many of the finer details could be lost in the transfer to print. Properly exposed X-ray plates captured clear outlines of the skeleton and also softer tissues, such as the skin, muscles, tendons, and even veins and arteries. Originally published in Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine, 2011. ![]()
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