3. X-Ray imaging
3. X-Ray imaging
It’s hard to imagine the correct diagnosis and treatment of injuries as common as fractures without X-ray imaging technology. X-rays were accidentally discovered when a German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was studying electric currents passing through a gas of extremely low pressure.
He observed that in a darkened room, the cathode ray tube covered with barium platinocyanide caused a fluorescent effect. Since the cathode rays are invisible, he didn’t know what the rays were and named it X-radiation for its unknown nature. He won the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his discovery.
The initial reception to the discovery, however, was met with hostility and mockery with a New York Times journalist referring to it as “an alleged discovery of a method to photograph the invisible”.
4. Antibiotics
People most commonly associate the advent of antibiotics with Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. In actuality, the age of antibiotics began in 1907 with the creation of Salvarsan by Alfred Bertheim and Paul Ehrlich. Today this Salvarsan is known as Arsphenamine. It was the first drug to effectively counter Syphilis, marking the beginning of anti-bacterial treatment.
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