3 She also argues that x-rays were understood in large part according to their apparent capacity to denude and concludes that they were explicitly sexualized as a result, with consequences both for clinician and for their reciprocal impact on the visual culture of the post-Victorian period. This led Bettyann Kevles to make the intriguing observation that x-rays were “the first technology that taught us, collectively, to hold our breath, waiting for the next shoe to drop”-that the delayed harm that the rays could do was the model for anxiety about other novel environmental factors, like nuclear fallout or Nutrasweet. 2 The excitement that attended the very existence of x-rays was fueled in no small measure by the fact that many physicians had similarly high expectations of the rays' curative potential-and a noticeable absence of trepidation that quickly resulted in both seemingly miraculous cures and gruesome injuries. In the first few years after their introduction, when Americans were gripped by “radiomania” (to adopt Carolyn Thomas de la Peña's useful term), thundering x-ray machines that worked on the edge of scientific understanding were trumpeted in newspapers and Chatauqua lectures as the source of miraculous cures.

The chaotic mix of reactions to the news of their discovery has been explored in a number of works, but relatively few studies have attempted to reconcile the roentgenological zeitgeist with their use in the clinic. Historians have taken notice of the anxiety that x-rays initially provoked, even before any real evidence that they could cause physical harm arose. This understanding was possible only because of the more hopeful era that preceded it: the simultaneous terror and exuberance that early machines evoked in patients and doctors curdled into lingering fear and disappointment later on.

The “horrors” that Hart knew his patients to be imagining were of a different sort: that radiation was inherently and irremediably dangerous, no matter how inconspicuous the machines that generated it. Many entered the clinic expecting precisely those outcomes, yet it was in these first few decades of clinical radiology that they were most easily reconciled to the use of x-rays. In the early years of medical radiology, patients subjected to x-rays of any sort would have found it impossible to nap, and were far more likely than Hart's patients to be burned, shocked, or misdiagnosed. The noise and inconvenience of the previous generation of x-ray machines had much to do with the reason a patient going in for radiotherapy in 1943 might “expect the horrendous,” but not simply because the patients of the 1940s had bad memories of the machines of the 1910s. Of course,” Hart added, “older machines were not so quiet and convenient.” 1 To a visitor expecting the horrendous it must all seem very drab and uninteresting. Most city bedrooms are noisier and far more uncomfortable than the treatment room. In fact, a good many of our patients cat nap during their treatments.

At the end of the treatment, the patient “has heard nothing, felt nothing. In his breezy and popularizing memoir These Mysterious Rays, radiologist Alan Hart describes what a typical patient might experience during a visit to his modern x-ray therapy clinic. This “domestication” of x-ray machines underscored their failure as a modern-day heroic medicine, while reinforcing an emergent understanding of radiation as a subtle, cumulative, and insidious threat. A quarter century later, refinement of the technology had made irradiation safer and more effective, but also made the operation of the machines themselves almost undetectable. As one of the icons of the new scientific medicine, x-rays bore much of the public's expectations for a technological panacea, a belief that was reinforced by the spectacle of their generation and their undeniable effect on the body. Their bizarre and sometimes overwhelming presentation in the clinic reinforced the contemporary public understanding of x-rays as fantastically potent yet ambiguously helpful.

The first x-ray machines were large, loud, sparking, smelly, and ostentatious devices, prone to mishap and injury even when fully under the control of the physicians who, in droves, invested money and prestige in them.

Xray vision 220 led price