THE SCIENTIFIC IMPORTANCE OF X-RAYS? 
By L. HENRY GARLAND, M. D? 
[With 2 plates] 
Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge; 
You go not, till I set you up a glass 
Where you may see the inmost part of you. 
(Hamlet, act ITI, scene 4, lines 23-25.) 
The discerning English dramatist wrote these amazingly prophetic 
lines some 300 years before a modest German physicist announced the 
discovery of a “new type of rays.” Yet, had he known, Shakespeare 
hardly could have penned a more apt description of a fluoroscopic 
examination—aided, it is granted in this instance, by a mirror, in 
which the good Queen of Denmark might “see her inmost part.” 'To 
continue the remarkable coincidence, the Queen, like many an appre- 
hensive patient, replies to Hamlet : 
What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? 
And Polonius cried forth: 
What ho! help, help, help! 
Before the days of shockproof X-ray equipment, such a scene might 
have taken place in a radiologist’s office; today it should be a rarity 
(unless Polonius were confronted with the statement for an unusually 
prolonged and complicated series of examinations). 
In the half century which has elapsed since Roentgen’s announce- 
ment there have been many developments in medical science which, 
at first glance, might seem to dwarf the tremendous importance of the 
discovery of X-ray. These developments include the perfection of 
antitoxic sera, of remarkable antibiotic agents (the sulfa drugs, peni- 
cillin, and similar molds), of stored blood or blood derivatives, and 
finally of planned atomic disintegration. Yet we believe it is safe to 
hazard the guess that in another 50 years we still shall look upon the 
X-ray as one of the developments of major scientific import of all time, 
1 Reprinted by permission from Electrical Engineering, vol. 64, No. 12, December 1945. 
? Associate Clinical Professor of Radiology, Stanford University School of Medicine; 
formerly Commander, M. C., U. S. N. R. 
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