It’s Not The Ozone That Kills You
Early experiments with X-rays go awry. What’s New in Old News, no. 3.
He should have stopped when the doctors amputated the thumb on his right hand.
The loss of two more fingers on his left hand was a clear warning.
But for the dogged Wolfram Fuchs, these setbacks were the price one paid for scientific progress. In the search for knowledge, did it matter if one became a “martyr for science”?
Wolfram Fuchs—German by birth—grew up in Chicago after his family emigrated to the United States. He came of age in an era where a great generation of scientists—Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Nikolai Tesla—were learning how to exploit electrical currents. Fascinated by this work, Fuchs completed an undergraduate degree in Germany, and followed that with graduate studies in electrical engineering at MIT. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen published the first description of X-rays. Destiny was calling, as were a group scientists who asked the young engineer to come run Chicago’s first X-ray laboratory. Fuchs accepted the offer and commenced his life’s work.
Wilhelm quickly mastered the art of producing skiagraphs – a term derived from the Greek skia, “shadow.” His images of structures within the human body seemed miraculous; they proved particularly useful for locating bullets embedded beneath the surface of human flesh, a common hazard in late-nineteenth century Chicago.
In 1896 Fuchs published an article in the Western Electrician that detailed his observations about the procedure. By this time he had performed more than 1,400 exposures and was widely-regarded as America’s leading X-ray authority.
Fuchs had observed only four cases of a painful “sunburn” after irradiating a patient; he attributed this small number of side effects to the protocol he had devised. It was essential, wrote Fuchs, for the the operator to limit the time a patient sat before the Crookes tube that produced the X-rays. 10-30 seconds was more than adequate when scanning an arm or neck for a bullet; thicker sections of the body—the torso, for example—might demand three to ten minutes.
Longer exposures produced painful burns. Fuchs attributed these injuries to the ozone produced when X-rays passed through the air. If this ozone made contact with a patient’s skin, the blood vessels constricted and cut off the flow of oxygen to the tissue. A burn and blisters usually followed a week later. If the ozone touched the scalp, the patient’s hair would fall out—but this would soon grow back.
Placing the Crookes tube at a distance from the patient mitigated the risk of ozone burns. An electric fan helped disperse ozone accumulations, and a protective layer of Vaseline, applied to the skin, further reduced the chance of damage.
In short, as long as the practitioner compensated for the ozone, the X-ray machine was completely safe, a marvelous boon to diagnostic medicine.
Of course the skiagraphs were not always perfect. In 1902 Fuchs scanned a man who complained of feeling something moving around in his stomach. After developing the film, Fuchs announced that a snake had taken up residence in the man’s gastric region.
Probably not, said dubious physicians.
Despite the occasional miss, the X-ray machine continued to demonstrate its value. Unfortunately for Wilhelm Fuchs, a danger more potent than ozone lay in his path. As the years passed, radiation poisoning began to affect his body. His occasional sunburns grew worse. His fingers turned red, blistered, and rotted. The doctors amputated the dying digits, cutting them away from one hand and then the other. Fuchs realized that he could not go on shedding fingers, and so he retired from the X-ray business.
Unfortunately, it was too late. In the waning months of 1906, he felt a pain in his right arm and side. Surgery relieved some of the discomfort, but the doctors could not stop the metastatic spread of cancer that rapidly consumed his torso. Six months later, on April 24, 1907, the scientist died at home.
Fuchs never understood what had killed him. This myopia was common among early X-ray experimenters. Despite the ongoing experience of burns, blisters, and in some cases cancer, it was decades before researchers established the link between radiation and its side-effects. X-ray technology continues to be a trade-off between its value as a diagnostic tool and the small chance that a dose of radiation might trigger severe consequences.
For Fuchs, the price was worth it. On his deathbed, as he parted company with his wife and two pre-teen sons, he asserted that he had no regrets. The science had been worth the price he was paying.
If only he had figured out that ozone problem.
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