Medical education: November 2010 Archives

Today is the 115th anniversary of the first production of x-rays (thank you, Google, for the reminder) and the approximately 27th anniversary that Dr. David C.  Sabiston, Jr, pimped yours truly about their discoverer, Wilhelm Roentgen (RENT-gun). No commemoration of historic medical events seems complete without traumatic personal memories of formal education, which also include being presented on rounds with a radiograph of a buckshot shoulder (something like this, if not this) and the ever-popular ruse of showing a chest x-ray of situs inversus...backwards.

Google eases or heightens the retentive pain (depending on how jazzed you get by primary sources) by providing, in its ever-expanding Books section, access to Roentgen's original paper, "Eine neue Art von Strahlen." For those who don't read German, a translation ("On a new kind of x-rays") is provided here by the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Radiograph taken by Wilhelm Roentgen on December 22, 1895, of the hand of his wife.