Fluoroscopes and Fluoroscopy

It is customary for the speakers whom you honor with this opportunity to begin their addresses with biographic notes and well deserved praise of the great Russell D. Carman, flavored, if the speaker was so fortunate as to have known Doctor Carman personally, by many an attractive little anecdote, with which the lore of Carman abounds (3, 37). I, too, knew and loved Russell Carman during his lifetime, as I cherish and revere his memory today. He was more than seventeen years my senior and I well remember the awe with which I first entered his commanding presence. How quickly the geniality and warmth of his personality dispelled my anxiety! His attitude toward us youngsters in the specialty was obviously ideal, and none of us failed to appreciate that he was our friend even before he knew where we were from or what we expected of him. There is another “Carman Lecture” in these United States, sponsored by the Minnesota Radiological Society and delivered annually at the meeting of the Minnesota State Medical Association. On June 25, 1935, the inimitable Percy Brown used as his title for that Carman Lecture, “The Inception and Development of Fluoroscopy: The Influence of Carman on Its Status in America” (3). The result was a masterpiece, in the best Percy Brown tradition. The journals of state medical societies are seldom as widely read as they deserve, and Minnesota Medicine is no exception. Instead of attempting to add my bit to the large and still growing lexicon of Russell Carman's biography, I am urging your editors and officers to republish, this time in Radiology, the 1935 address by Percy Brown. Then, if my paper this evening should be deemed worthy of publication, it would make me very happy to have it appear as a sort of technical appendix to Doctor Brown's masterpiece. For nearly half a century physicists and engineers have devoted themselves to the advancement of roentgenology. Today we have access to apparatus which was undreamed of a few years ago. But these spectacular advances in method and equipment have practically all been in the fields of therapy and roentgenography. Fluoroscopy is much as it was when Carman's first edition appeared in 1917 (8). In fact, there is remarkably little difference between the 1941 models of commercially available fluoroscopes and the one Bob Kelley sold my father back in 1912 (Figs. 1-A and 1-B). And this, in spite of the fact that changes in equipment for therapy and roentgenography have been so marked that there is little resemblance between the apparatus of today and that of earlier years. I do not mean that there have been no changes or improvements. In matters affecting convenience and maneuverability, steady progress has been made.