A century ago, the living body, like most of the material world, was opaque. Then Wilhelm Roentgen captured and X-ray image of his wife's finger, her wedding ring
floating"" around a white bone, and our range of vision changed forever. By the 1920s, X-ray technology was common-place: all army recruits had lined up for chest pictures during WWI, and children were examining the bones of their feet in shoe store fluoroscopes, spectacularly unaware of the radiation they were absorbing. Through lucid prose, vivid anecdotes, and over seventy striking illustrations, science writer Bettyann Holtzman Kevles shows how X-rays and the subsequent daughter technologies, CT, MRI, PET, ultrasound, transformed the practice of medicine (from paediatrics to neurosurgery), the rules of evidence in courts, and the vision of artists.
By:
Bettyann Kevles
Imprint: Little, Brown and Company
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 156mm,
Width: 229mm,
Spine: 24mm
Weight: 550g
ISBN: 9780201328332
ISBN 10: 020132833X
Pages: 394
Publication Date: 19 March 1998
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unknown
* 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
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.
