In the spring of 2011, I was attending the European Congress of Radiology when I was greeted by Adrian Thomas, a librarian and archivist for the British Institute of Radiology, whom I have been corresponding with and have seen at meetings for the past several years.
“You must come with us to join ISHRAD,” he said. “That’s the International Society for the History of Radiology, and you must join it with us tomorrow.” So along I went and joined up. And this year, at its second meeting, I was their principal speaker, telling radiology historians, mostly from Europe, about how I got into the same interests.
For the past two decades, I have been plunging into the history of American radiology and writing several million words about elements of the topic. When I got involved in putting together the radiology centennial in 1995, I realized that for all of my efforts, I knew very little about the beginning of radiology in Europe, except for the discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen and the discovery of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie. I mentioned my dilemma to my British friend Peter Dawson. He introduced me to Adrian Thomas, and we have communicated ever since. So Adrian asked me to speak to ISHRAD.
In preparing for the talk, it seemed to me appropriate to tell about my 50 years of involvement in radiology. As the director of publications when I was hired by the American College of Radiology in 1961, my task was to tell the American public about radiology. So I had to admit that my first task was to learn how radiology started, how it grew, where it had reached, and where it was trying to go forward. And, in the first few years, I was part of the American College of Radiology’s team trying to persuade Congress to treat radiology fairly in Medicare. That succeeded in 1965, when the law was passed. From that time to now, efforts to advance radiology have been key to all American radiology organizations.
In mentioning this notion, I admitted to ISHRAD that I had been trying to learn more about European radiology. Roentgen wrote three articles about his discovery of x-rays. And European physicists who had been exploring the injection of electricity into vacuum tubes had to admit that they too had created x-ray energy. But they did not discover it until Roentgen did. Within weeks of Roentgen’s first publication on the last day of 1895, hundreds of people in Europe and North America had started using the invisible energy he called x-rays.
The first radiology journal, English Skiagraphie , was published in 1897 by the London Roentgen Society. In 1896, the French scientist Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity, wrote a series of monographs in a French publication. The Journal of the American Medical Association published its first medical x-ray article in 1896. And in 1897, Heber Robarts, an American physician, started a journal that was adopted by the American Roentgen Ray Society in 1900.
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