Technology and Culture

Anyone who has worked on the history of radiation cannot avoid wondering at the public's faith in the commercial uses of X-ray technologies. For example, historian Rebecca Herzig estimates that tens of thousands of women across the United States and Canada may have taken X-ray treatments for hair removal, despite the fact that the practice was officially deemed harmful and taken off the market in 1946. In fact, women continued to use it well into the 1960s. But why has this been the case, despite the early warnings and signs of danger?

In Radiation Evangelists, Jeffrey Womack poses this urgent question in relation to patients and practitioners of X-rays and radium in the early twentieth century. The answer is deceptively simple: operating in a context of uncertainty, radiation therapists needed faith. But faith in what? Womack's unique and exciting contribution to the history of radiation is the framing of X-rays and radium as new technologies that were transformed into therapeutic tools through a complicated and multifaceted process. Key actors in this transformation were the "radiation evangelists," a diverse group of [End Page 1230] practitioners who embraced both technologies and developed therapeutic procedures beyond any contemporary ethics.

When talking about radiation during this early period, we often think of the cruel industrialists who ignored signs of radium's deadly effects on women dial painters, the radiologists who are usually portrayed as "martyrs" of an unexplored new discipline, or the well-known cases of radium poisoning due to excessive drinking of radium tonics. Womack's book changes our perception of this period by turning the spotlight on its complexities and the ways in which radiation therapy was entangled in bitter battles for professional legitimacy between licensed physicians, who quickly incorporated X-rays in their medical practice, and unlicensed practitioners, who opposed strict regulations and questioned the emphasis on licensure, training, and the standardization of uses of X-rays. As Womack gets to the bottom of these disputes, it emerges that these battles concerned the issue of who had the right to practice this new medical specialization. Interestingly enough, Womack reminds us that geopolitical conflicts, even in this early historical period, also influenced the development of both X-ray and radium therapy. For example, Western colonial powers promoted the early use of X-ray emitters through their military physicians in Sudan and Afghanistan. During and right after World War I, radium supplies became available from specific colonial territories. And despite military conflicts and war, knowledge of X-ray technologies continued to flow back and forth between national radiological communities in Europe.

The focus on the professionalization of radiation therapy also brings issues of medical ethics to the forefront. Despite the great uncertainty involved in the use of X-ray technologies, Womack argues that understanding the medical practices of the early radiation evangelists presupposes a shift from the notion of ethics as the application of professional rules and codes of conduct to ethics as a matter of good character. X-ray therapy entailed a high risk for both patient and therapist. The "Golden Rule" of medical practice at the time required that a physician prescribe only the treatment he would feel comfortable prescribing to himself and his family. Instead of attributing ill motives to the early radium therapists, Womack's historiographical perspective allows a closer and more detailed look at what the Greeks would have called the "ethos" of these early radiation devotees: the moral nature of their character and guiding beliefs.

Radiation Evangelists is not only a well-researched history of X-ray therapy. It also makes an important contribution to science and technology studies by providing a wonderful analysis and case study of Wiebe Bijker's notion of technological frame. To Womack, the cold cathode users of the 1900s shared an understanding of an artifact that they themselves constructed by interacting with it. This approach explains the persistent technological faith and optimism that...