Table of Contents

* Introduction The X-Ray Years * The Discovery of X-Rays: Seeing Is Believing * Medical Applications: The Living Body Beneath the Skin * Technological Innovation 18971918: Building a Better Mousetrap * Medical Politics Between the Wars: Setting Standards * Technological Innovation 19181940: Sharper, Clearer, Deeper * X-Rays in the Imagination: The Avant-Garde Through Surrealism Beyond The X-Ray * The Perfect Slice: The Story of CT Scanning * A Subtler Slice: Magnetic Resonance Imaging * From the Inside Out: PET (Positron Emission Tomography) in Nuclear Medicine * Looking Through Women: The Development of Ultrasound and Mammography * The Transparent Body in Late Twentieth-Century Culture

About the Author

Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles is a writer whose reviews of books on science have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and on National Public Radio's Science Friday. She is the author of Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in the Animal Kingdom.

Reviews

Though it would be hard to imagine a topic with less apparent general appeal, this addition to the Sloan Technology Series is in fact a very good read. Writing 101 years after the discovery of X rays by Wilhelm Roentgen, the author presents the history of the technology, showing how it was refined over the following 50 years and challenged after WWII by newer technologies based on television and the computer. Because of X rays, people began to see the world differently, and we now are at the point where we "no longer accept surfaces as barriers, but see them instead as smoky scrims through which we now have access." At the same time, X rays became associated with tissue damage and ultimately with cancer, making them the first technology with a "built-in time bomb." This has caused us to think differently about science than we did before, the author claims, even though fear of the unintended consequences of knowledge goes back in our culture at least as far as Icarus and is more recently manifested in the cautionary tales of Drs. Faust and Frankenstein. The second wave of imaging technology, involving CT, MRI and PET scans, has had less of a traumatic effect on culture, perhaps because each advance was a more gradual accretion based on previous efforts. While this is interesting science, it is the cultural effects spelled out in the final chapter on "The Transparent Body in Late Twentieth-Century Culture" that constitute the heart of this engrossing and informative book. Illustrated. (Jan.)

X-rays, CT scans, and other imaging technologies have been part of every major advance in clinical medicine in the century, and this book ably captures how new methods in diagnostic imaging heralded new treatments and how the quest for better treatments spawned the invention of better tools for "seeing" within the human body. Kevles, a science writer and reviewer, has done a good job of collecting vivid and apt anecdotes from the history of medical imaging and using them to illustrate the advances‘and pitfalls‘of the technology. The first half of the book is a particularly thorough and readable history of X-rays, which were the principal diagnostic tool of the first half of the 20th century; the remainder covers more than a dozen imaging devices and techniques, including ultrasound, mammography, PET scans, and the like, ending with a sort of poststructuralist chapter on "artists," whose palette now includes CT scans. This volume will be particularly useful in general collections with strong patronage in science, technology, and medicine and a wise acquisition for specialized collections in the history of science and technology.‘Mark L. Shelton, Univ. of Massachusetts Medical Ctr., Worcester