Medicine: Without Armor

Nobody knew much about the dangers of overexposure to X rays when a young intern named Percy Emerson Brown set up the X-ray department at Boston Children’s Hospital. The year was 1903 and the X ray was only seven years old. As Dr. Brown later wrote, “Enthusiasm was in the saddle, accoutered with the lance of investigation and the spurs of continued experimental revelation, but not yet with the shield and armor of protection.”

Within a year, young Dr. Brown’s fingers and nails showed signs of damage; his hands and face became rough and scaly. Soon warty growths appeared. But Dr. Brown kept on with his dangerous work, testing the value of X rays in the study of kidney stones, branching out to see what they could tell about disorders at the base of the skull. In France in World War I, he took X rays for operations to be performed by the late great Brain Surgeon Harvey Gushing. Dr. Brown worked day & night with virtually unshielded field equipment, ignoring the invisible peril.

After a few years of civilian practice, Radiologist Brown realized that some of the warty growths which plagued him were cancerous. He went back to Massachusetts, eked out an existence on an Army disability pension. Over the years he submitted to 50 or more operations. Every few weeks, when he saw a fellow Harvard alumnus, Surgeon Ernest M. Daland, he would point to a bleeding wart and say: “That one’s degenerating a little . . . Won’t stop bleeding. Give me a little Novocain and take it off.” The wound would be grafted with skin from Dr. Brown’s belly or leg, which soon began to look like patchwork quilts.

Strangely, none of the radiation-caused cancers attacked a vital organ, though parts of Dr. Brown’s fingers had to be amputated, and finally he lost an eye. He wrote little of his suffering, though he noted: “I have probably received in divided doses, as a sort of voluntary guinea pig in a hospital laboratory, the same deleterious effects I might have sustained in one massive explosive emanation, had I been an experimental Bikini goat.”

But reverently Dr. Brown gathered the sad records of his colleagues and contemporaries into a book, American Martyrs to Science Through the Roentgen Rays. He quoted one of his subjects: “For a description of the pain and suffering … no language, sacred or profane, is adequate.”

Last week, after more than 20 years of such torment, death—ironically, from a heart ailment—came to Percy Emerson Brown, 74, a martyr to the Roentgen rays.