Medicine: Skeleton's Calling Card

• Share

One of the first X-ray pictures ever made had nothing to do with pure science. In 1895, German Physicist Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen made an X-ray photograph of his wife's hand, to make her appreciate the work he was doing and forgive him for having slighted her cooking.

In San Francisco last week, X rays of the hand were getting more expert attention. Before a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, Britain's Dr. James F. Brailsford reported that such pictures can help in the diagnosis of important body ailments.

The hand, explained Dr. Brailsford, is "the skeleton's calling card." It can be held perfectly steady for X-ray purposes; there is little tissue between the bones and the camera, hence details photograph more sharply than with deep organic photography. Among the diseases that can sometimes be spotted by radiological palm reading: too much or little activity of the thyroid; nutritional disorders like scurvy and rickets; gout; cancer of the chest (which, like some other chest diseases, shows up as new bone laid down around normal bone); arthritis.