RONTGEN RAYS. 
203 
been done. I felt sure when this process was first talked about that it 
would be very useful, and I made up my mind to try to learn to do it 
myself ; but at that time it Avas impossible to get the apparatus—the 
coils, such as Mr. Webster showed you to-night, were only made as toys, 
and what few there were were bought up immediately by men who 
wanted to work at the process ; I remembered, however, that my friend 
Mr. Webster had a coil in his house, so I went and asked him if he 
would be kind enough to lend it to me. He said immediately that he 
would if he could find it, but he said “ I am not going to waste my time 
over that tomfoolery, you know.” He fished out the coil from under¬ 
neath some rubbish in his studio, and I got it put in order and brought 
it down to his chemical laboratory at the Blackheath Art Club. I took 
that coil up myself to the makers, in the centre of London, and I 
remember how I was jeered by the boys and sneered at by the men, 
and nearly taken up by a policeman who thought I had some kind of 
infernal machine with me. But I had it put in order ; I purchased 
some tubes and I asked my friend Mr. Webster, who I knew was a good 
electrician and photographer, to help me to work at it ; and he very 
soon got a good deal more enthusiastic over it than I am, and the result 
of his enthusiasm he has put before you to-night. This process, of 
course, will be most useful in fractures of the limbs. Before you could 
photograph a bone a fracture was put up in splints in a comparatively 
haphazard style, and it was generally very uncertain whether the two 
fractured ends of the bones were brought together straight ; but now 
after you have set the bone you can photograph it and make quite sure, 
as Mr. Webster has shown you by the aid of the lantern slides, that the 
two ends are in apposition. We have had two or three rather dreadful¬ 
looking fractures shown to us to-night, and one where the bone was so 
smashed that it was a terrible thing, but I am sorry to say that my friend 
Mr. Webster was a little wrong about that—it has never been put 
straight, it had been fractured for six or eight weeks before it was 
photographed. But that kind of thing cannot happen now when the 
bone can be photographed immediately after it is set, even through the 
splints. 
I thought the best way to illustrate this subject was to bring a few 
photographs that I have taken just lately. Here are some. This process 
is very useful in taking needles out of hands and feet. These two 
photographs I will pin together, and ladies and gentlemen will perhaps 
be kind enough not to pull them too far apart; they are two hands with 
needles in them (handing round the same), and you will see the needles 
show very plainly indeed. A needle or any other object shows most 
plainly when it is placed next to the sensitive plate during the photo¬ 
graphic process. That is very well shown in one of these photographs. 
It is the hand of a lady (and I hope the ladies will be interested) with 
a gold bracelet on her wrist, and you will see that one side of the gold 
bracelet is very much plainer than the other. The palm of the hand 
was placed on the sensitive plate and the locket was turned up on to 
the back of the hand. You will see that the part of the bracelet which 
was next to the plate shows very clearly, whilst that on the back of the 
hand is comparatively faint. Now I make those few remarks in order 
to illustrate the next case, which is that of a knee joint with the patella, 
or knee-cap, showing. A woman last week knelt on a needle, which 
went into her knee. The house surgeon at the hospital tried to cut it 
out by making an incision over the middle of the knee-cap, where it 
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