Abstract
By the end of the 1920s, the wholesale commodification of x-rays and radium had made them ubiquitous. Nonscientist Americans could and did interact with them physically, intellectually, and rhetorically. Some were indifferent, and many had retained through those first few decades the vague dread or acute fear that had been part of the spectrum of reactions from the start. Those misgivings might be the result of specific fears having to do with the direct experience of irradiation itself. They might also be due to a wounded sense of Victorian propriety, a reaction against a new physics that seemed daily more metaphysical, or a manifestation of the broader antimodern sentiment that had not only Soddy in its sights but also Joyce, Stravinsky, and Picasso. For the most part, though, science and medicine were held in high regard, and by virtue of decades of popular science writing, x-rays and radioactivity were more than ever the emblems of those disciplines.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
Ross Mullner, Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy (Washington, DC: American Public Health Association, 1999), 94–96.
William Kovarik, “The Radium Girls,” in Mass Media and Environmen tal Conflict, William Kovarik and Mark Neuzil, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996). Cf. revised edition (2002), http://www.runet.edu/%7Ewkovarik/envhist/radium.html. Accessed December 11, 2011.
Jacalyn Duffin and Charles R. R. Hayter, “Baring the Sole: The Rise and Fall of the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope,” Isis 91, no. 2 (June 2000): 281.
David J. DiSantis and Denise M. DiSantis, “Radiologic History Exhibit: Wrong Turns on Radiology’s Road of Progress,” RadioGraphics 11, no. 6 (November 1991): 1126.
Rebecca Herzig, “Removing Roots: ‘North American Hiroshima Maidens’ and the X Ray,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 4 (1999): 737–740.
Otto Juettner, Modern Physio-Therapy: A System of Drugless Therapeutic Methods, Including a Chapter on X-Ray Diagnosis (Cincinnati: Harvey, 1906), 3.
Albert Abrams, Diagnostic Therapeutics: A Guide for Practitioners in Diagnosis by and of Drugs and Methods Other Than Drug-Giving (New York: Rebman, 1910), 180.
Tilman Howard Plank, A Treatise on Actinic-Ray Therapy, for Physicians Interested in Physical Therapeutics (Chicago: Manz Corporation, 1919), 16.
William Beaumont, Infra-Red Radiation (London: H. K. Lewis, 1936).
S. Russ and Hector A. Colwell, X-Ray and Radium Injuries: Prevention and Treatment (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 185.
M. Mok, “Radium, Life-Giving Element, Deals Death in Hands of Quacks,” Popular Science Monthly 131, July 1932, 9–11, 105–106.
Jordan D. Marché II, Theaters of Time and Space: American Planetaria 1930–1970 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 80.
Chapter four (“The Empire of Science”) of Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
Elof Carlson, Genes, Radiation and Society: The Life and Work of H. J. Muller (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 150.
Alexander Snyder, “Blasphemer’s Plateau,” Amazing Stories 1, no. 7 (October 1926): 656–671.
Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Solved Death,” Science Fiction 1, no. 3 (August 1939): 82–86.
Lloyd Arther Eshbach, “Dust,” Marvel Science Stories 2, no. 2 (November 1940): 91–99.
John L. Chapman, “Cycle,” Marvel Science Stories 2, no. 2 (November 1940): 106–112.
Warren Sanders, “The Sterile World,” Wonder Stories Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Spring 1932): 408.
Cf. Lawrence Badash, Elizabeth Hodes, and Adolph Tiddens, “Nuclear Fission: Reaction to the Discovery in 1939,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 130, no. 2 (June 1986): 212.
Edward P. Sumers, Science Fiction Magazine 2, no. 4 (April 1941): 59.
Robert Heinlein, “Blowups Happen,” Astounding Science Fiction 25, no. 7 (September 1940): 61–62.
John Clute and Peter Nichols, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
Alan L. Hart, These Mysterious Rays: A Nontechnical Discussion of the Uses of X-Rays and Radium, Chiefly in Medicine (New York: Harper, 1943), 151.
Henry K. Pancoast, “The Therapeutic Effects of the X-Rays, as Shown from the Results of Treatment of Nearly One Hundred Cases,” Archives of Electrology and Radiology 4 (1904), 123–129.
F. S. O’Hara, “Looking Backward,” Radiography & Clinical Photography 8 (May-June 1932): 5.
Israel Klein, “Science Tries to Equal Radium’s Terrific Power by Electricity,” NEA Service (January 5, 1928).
John E. Lodge, “Giant X-Ray Machines: Science’s Siege Guns in War on Disease,” Popular Science, April 1937, 27.
Copyright information
© 2013 Matthew Lavine
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lavine, M. (2013). Backlash. In: The First Atomic Age. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137307224_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137307224_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45547-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30722-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)