The Roentgen rays in medicine and surgery as an aid in diagnosis and as a therapeutic agent

New York: Macmillan, 1901. FIRST EDITION. With nearly 400 text illustrations. Contemporary cloth boards; new endpapers. An excellent copy. First edition of one of the first major textbooks on use of X-rays. As we all know, X-rays were first discovered on November 8, 1895, by Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923), who received the first Nobel prize in physics in 1901. The medical potential of X-rays was clear and by early February, 1896, literature on the subject began to be published. In America three different institutions made claim to the first documented use of X-rays for medical purposes: Dartmouth, where two faculty brothers, Gilman and Edwin Frost, a physician and a physicist, respectively, took an X-ray of a local boy with a broken arm. Edwin mentioned this case in a February 14 article in the journal Science, the first known published American reference to medical X-rays; New York surgeon William Tillinghast Bull brought in a case of a person shot in the hand to Columbia scientist Michael Pupin; and in Boston, physician Francis Henry Williams, who was both an MIT grad in chemistry and a Harvard Medical School–trained physician, asked MIT physics professors Ralph R. Lawrence and Charles L. Norton to take X-rays of patients. Though unsigned, some attribute a February 20 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal to him, which provides the first published X-ray in the United States of a pathological condition.

The American Roentgen Ray Society was founded in 1900, and became a forum for working out some of the safety concerns about X-rays. By 1901, Williams (1852-1936) had oriented his own practice completely to radiology, as shown by this magisterial book, which was reprinted in three editions.

See Theerman, Paul, Through Science: The Rise of the X-Ray (posted on November 7, 2014 by nyamhistorymed).