A week later RÖntgen x-rayed his wife's hand while she was wearing her wedding band, the x-ray revealed her ring and bones, this medical breakthrough revolutionized medicine (Bellis)This now archaic technology, still used as a low grade diagnostic tool, once originally used as an expression of art it was not till several years later that the potential for medicinal benefits was fully understood as the first commercially available x-ray machines were available for healthcare facilities in 1914 (DeJauregui, 100 Medical Milestones 40), Marie Curie and her daughter Irene Joliot Curie, constructed x-ray stations in the battlefields of World War I to help diagnose wounded battle soldiers' injuries such as skull fractures (DeJauregui, 100 Medical Milestones 52-55)
Since this time as we have learned the many benefits and practical uses of the x-ray we have been able to develop and modernize this once evolutionary tool of medicine, the x-ray permitted doctors and medical professionals to do the impossible, a wide range of non-invasive approaches is now available for the assessment of brain functions and anatomy, compared to the initial decades of a century where imaging studies on the brain, prior to the availability of computer assisted imaging techniques, were based on invasive procedures such as pneumoencephalography, ventriculography, angiography (Sutton 209-21).Yet in the past decades, several research studies, that would be nowadays considered totally unethical, were carried out, both on uninformed normal "volunteers" as well as on diseased subjects. In several instances, such volunteers included prison inmates. Where once in order to peer inside the mind a doctor's or researcher's only tool was a saw, he now has an option, a chance to look where no one has ever seen before (Alfano and Brunetti).
For the specialty of radiology the development of the x-ray was just the beginning, for years later another inventor makes a new breakthrough in modern medicine.
