Medicine: X-Rays in Chicago

Several dozen U. S. hospitals have X-ray machines transforming 400,000 volts of electricity into X-rays for the treatment of cancer. Half-a-dozen have machines ranging from 600,000 to 1,200,000 volts. Last week the man most responsible for the development of vacuum tubes which accomplish those tremendous transformations of energy, Dr. William David Coolidge of General Electric Co., reminded the Fifth International Congress of Radiology in Chicago that Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a 5,000,000-volt generator which could be adapted for X-ray work, told them that an experimental 10,000,000-volt generator exists, promised them that “it would be a perfectly straightforward engineering and manufacturing job to build one for several times this voltage.”

Thus was opened to specialists a vast extension of the X-ray’s use whenever they learn to employ it profitably. It was only one of many new X-ray possibilities of which the radiologists last week heard as they sat in convention. Other notable advances of which they learned:

¶A method of making X-ray cinema photographs of organs functioning in the living body. Devised by Dr. Russell Reynolds of London, this consists of a very bright fluoroscopic screen on which the direct X-ray picture is thrown and there photographed as it changes by a cine-camera. Since motion picture film must pause 16 times each second to make its record, Dr. Reynolds likewise interrupts his X-ray beam 16 times a second. This reduces the danger in X-ray work of burning a patient or sterilizing him, and therefore enables Dr. Reynolds to make exposures of as long as 20 seconds. To heart specialists the new method promises a new means of checking their findings by ordinary methods (stethoscopic, percussion, cardiograph).

¶The demonstration by Dr. J. G. Dillon that not only the human lungs but the bowels breathe. Dr. Dillon, a U. S. emigre practicing in Moscow, explained: “Air which has found access into the stomach and then into the intestines can be sucked into the blood. Especially it is true about oxygen which can dissolve in any liquid of the digestive tract. There is no impediment of anatomic character to such absorption of oxygen through the walls of the digestive tract, for the digestive tract embryologically comes from the same source as the respiratory tract. Comparative physiology presents indisputable proofs of a respiratory function of the digestive tract of some vertebrae. There is sufficient evidence as to the possibility of utilizing oxygen in the digestive tract. There are known cases (testified by medical observation) of life during ‘several hours of the infants, whose lungs on post-mortem examination were found to be absolutely unstraightened.” Special significance of this: if an X-ray of a newborn infant shows air in the stomach or bowels, then no matter if the lungs lack air, that infant was born alive.