Rays of Wonder

Hanna Saltzman sets a captivating history of radiology alongside that of her family, generations of medical professionals who championed the benevolent powers of x-rays and radiation and also suffered their damages. Her essay for the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review wrestles with the impossibility of perfect vision and the inadvertent harms we visit on those who we most want to protect.

Within months of Röntgen’s discovery, the unintended consequences of the X-ray began to emerge. In Tennessee, a boy came to the hospital after an accidental gunshot wound to his head. To test the equipment before trying it on his patient, his physician first conducted a prolonged X-ray of his own head. Three weeks later, the physician lost his hair. That same year, a New York doctor conducting X-ray experiments on himself noticed that his fingernails had stopped growing, his knuckles burned, and even the skin of his hand began to peel away. Blisters bloomed on other people’s bodies—on their hands and arms and chests. Thomas Edison started feeling cramps in his stomach; his vision began to blur. His glassblower, Clarence Dally, tested the quality of the fluoroscope tubes through daily X-rays of his own body. His hair started falling out, and his eyelashes and eyebrows burned away. His hands became red, swollen, and ulcerated. Knobs of deformed tissue bulged from his fingers. A biopsy of Dally’s pinky revealed cancer.

. . .

When Edison saw Dally’s tumors, he swore to never again expose himself or anyone else to radiation. In the year before Dally’s death, as the doomed glassblower lost himself to the disease, the New York World ran a story on the gruesome costs of this celebrated breakthrough. “Don’t talk to me about X-rays,” the prolific inventor told the reporter. “I am afraid of them.”