Radiography of an Entire Human Skeleton

William James Morton, 1897, New York

Today’s tendency towards an ever-greater neutral, objective representation of the human body is perfectly exemplified by contemporary diagnostic imaging.  Radiography is a negative of an X-ray photograph in which those parts of the body which are transparent to X-rays appear black, while those which absorb the rays produce shadows in shades of grey up to white for the bones. Discovered late in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen, X-rays at long last enabled us to see through the human body and the technique spread immediately.  Just a year after the discovery, in 1897, William James Morton (1845-1920) made the first ever X-ray of an entire living human in New York. The subject was a woman around thirty years of age. Some of her personal dress accessories are also visible in the X-ray negative.  In order to generate the necessary flux of electrons to produce the rays, Morton used a thirty-centimetre induction coil connected to the New York power grid. The sitter was exposed to the rays for a total of thirty minutes, although the session had to be suspended several times to allow the overheated apparatus to cool down.