Harnessing the modern miracle: physicists, physicians, and the making of American radium therapy

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the newly-discovered element radium was at the center of a storm of public fascination and was touted as a cure for all manner of ailments by patent medicine sellers. By the early 1930s, radium was the foundation of a standard cancer therapy in hospitals. How this transformation occurred, and the physicians and physicists who led that development, are the subject of this dissertation. Early adopters of radium therapy appropriated knowledge, material, and practices from physics as they integrated radium into their practices. Starting in the mid-1910s, even as the long-term dangers of radium were becoming apparent, radium therapy moved into the hospital, in large part because of new equipment adapted from the physics laboratory, and radium therapists invited physicists into the hospital as key collaborators in standardized radium therapy.