Light and Shadow
How we learned to rein in the risks of X-rays
In 2010, the Dutch radiologist Gerrit Kemerink X-rayed a hand at Maastricht University Medical Center. There wouldn’t normally be anything unusual about that – except that this was the hand of a dead body and Kemerink was using an X-ray unit from 1896.
Comparison of the two hand X-rays from Gerrit Kemerink’s experiment: on the left, the image taken with the 1896 apparatus; on the right, the image captured with a modern X-ray unit from 2010
Source: Prof. Gerrit Kemerink, Department of Radiology, Maastricht University Medical Center

Early X-ray damage to the hands of the 28-year-old RGS employee Otto Schreiber in an image taken in 1910
