"Incongruent Bedfellows": Physics and Medicine in the Formation of North American and British Radiology, 1896-1930

The announcement of the discovery of x-rays in 1896 sparked great excitement among physicists who rushed to replicate Wilhelm Röntgen’s experiments, hoping to make sense of the properties of this new disturbance in the aether. The medical world was equally entranced by the x-ray pictures that circulated in the press. The diagnostic possibilities were clear, and within a few months, doctors were able to purchase equipment to begin their own x-ray investigations. Physicists and doctors asked very different kinds of questions of these new rays, and the medical and physical investigations were largely separate. There were, however, a number of points of contact between these two worlds. Physicists were members of the first x-ray societies alongside doctors, and, by the 1920s, a small number of physicists were employed in the United States and Britain in hospitals and medical schools. In this study, I trace the contributions of these few physicists in medicine in order characterise the professional relationships that developed between doctors and physicists, individuals from very different disciplinary cultures. I show that the physicists’ values of objectivity and precise measurement, along with their deep belief in regularity, often clashed with the culture of individualism in early 20th century medicine. The first doctors to use x-rays expressed faith in their own, unique clinical art, and emphasized bodies’ idiosyncratic responses to radiation. These conflicting attitudes were evident in debates surrounding the best way to measure therapeutic x-rays, and I argue that the eventual adoption of the röntgen as the international unit of x-ray measurement in 1928 represents a victory of the values of physics. I link the increasing authority awarded to physicists in the American and British x-ray communities to the particular leadership roles taken on by these individuals as physics teachers and safety inspectors.

Department dc:contributor.department

History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Hamilton, Vivien

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Yeang, Chen-Pang

• History of Science
• History of Medicine

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/67273

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/67273