Every time a doctor locates a hidden fracture, identifies a tumour or measures blood flow inside a beating heart, they often rely on a force we cannot see: radiation. By converting atomic physics into clinical insight, it powers some of the most advanced imaging and therapy systems in medicine.
In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was working in his lab in Germany, experimenting with cathode rays in a dark room, when he noticed a fluorescent screen glowing, even though it shouldn’t have. He realised some new, invisible rays were passing through solid objects. He called them X-rays.
Within weeks, the doctors realised that these rays pass through soft tissues, bones absorb them and you can catch the shadows on a photographic plate. Thus, the first ever medical X-rays was performed on Röntgen’s wife’s hand, to which she said, “I’ve seen my death”, because it showed underlying bones for the first time, clearly. With the discovery of Polonium and Radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, the basic foundations of radiotherapy were laid. From 1930s-1950s, physicists developed artificial radioisotopes in cyclotrons. George De Hevesy used radioactive tracers to track chemical pathways in living beings. This became the foundation of PET scans, SPECT scans and thyroid scans. Medicine suddenly had a way to study the physiology of human body, not just anatomy.
Read the full document, prepared by our team member Aarushi Sharma, who is pursuing MBBS.
