Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Fallout: The Making of a Radioactive Exhibit  Micaela Sullivan-Fowler  2/20/13 UP841  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. [LAUGHTER] You can't laugh at that. That's not funny yet. [LAUGHTER] I work here at the UW Madison Biotech Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. It's your chance to experience science as exploring the unknown within and with this community of researchers. Tonight, it's a special pleasure to be able to introduce to you Micaela Sullivan-Fowler. She has been the curator and history of health sciences librarian at Ebling Library for the past 14 years. 

She acts as the liaison to the Department of Medical History & Bioethics within the School of Medicine and Public Health. She works with graduate and undergraduate students, helping them to navigate the print and electronic worlds when using primary material for their research papers. Micaela's own research has centered on the history of alternative medicine and the history of Plymouth Colony therapeutics. Her most recent exhibits were both in connection with UW's Go Big Read initiative. The first, "It's Good for You," was in conjunction with Michael Pollen's book In Defense of Food, and the second, "Informing Consent: Unwitting Subjects in Medicine's Pursuit of Beneficial Knowledge" honored Rebecca Skloot's book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In designing exhibits, Micaela's primary goals are to highlight books in the Ebling's collection and to create thematic pathways between the subjects in the individual cases. While the current exhibit on the history of radioactivity, x-rays, and radium has had glowing reviews, it was perhaps the most difficult to tell in such a limited space. The discovery of so many interesting stories is what Micaela loves to share. Micaela is one of the splendid people that I get to work with on this university. Everybody should be so lucky to work with colleagues like Micaela. 

She's going to have a great story to tell. It's not kidding when they say it's glowing. Please join me in welcoming Micaela to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE] Hi and thank you for coming. And we're going to be talking about the making of the radioactive exhibit in connection with the Go Big Read book Radioactive by Lauren Redniss. And I just need to figure out how to do all this for a moment, if you'll bear with me. Okay. So, a little background. I'm part of the steering committee that doesn't choose the Go Big Read book but automatically, as soon as that choice is made, quickly tries to envision projects in conjunction with the choice. And when they chose Radioactive, if I'm honest, my first thought, instead of doing a grand exhibit the way I did with the Pollen book and the Skloot book, my first thought was, finally an excuse to show the fish. 

And the fish is this fish. And the reason I chose this was because it is, of course, has something to do with radiography. And the people who took the photo were Eder and Valenta who gave us the first monograph on Roentgen photography. As early as January 1896, Joseph Eder, one of the early pioneers of modern photography, and his collaborator, Eduard Valenta, began to experiment with Roentgen's rays, discovered by Roentgen in the last week of 1895. They presented the first series of Roentgen photographs at a meeting of the Viennese Photographic Society on the 22nd of January, 1896. So, very rapidly after Roentgen's discovery. These photographs were published in the small edition in a large portfolio of 15 extremely fine plates, superbly reproduced as photogravures. Their subjects included a human foot, a variety of fish, frogs, a rabbit, and a fabulous snake. The snake is actually, in photographic form, is on the table for you to look at afterward. So, this was a great excuse. 

UW chose a book in which I could actually build an entire exhibit around one print of fish, but it became much more ambitious than that.  More importantly, I wanted to expand on the scientific and health sciences narrative that Redniss had told, which included not only the poignant story of the Curies and Marie's life after Pierre, but also touched on the uses of radium, the bomb, and other radioactive themes. Just for a moment, how many of you have read Radioactive? A handful. Okay. I don't refer to it a lot, but there are pieces where, if you have read it, I might resonant a little bit more for you. And I was also intrigued by the fact that Redniss, as an artist, brings multiple influences to her work. Newspaper clippings, old photographs, interesting graphics, unexpected visual elements, and those are considerations in the exhibit work that I do. Trying to incorporate a myriad of primary and artifactual pieces as well as actual fabric, color, different mounts, and display pieces that provide visual interest while adding to the engagement with the viewer. I also wanted this to be stylish, like Redniss' book and like Marie and her daughters. Thirdly, I'm trained as a public historian, meaning I like to bring history in some for or narrative to the public. 

It's a little bit different than an academic historian, but it was my training. And so, I like to weave a narrative theme between the cases as well as have each case tell a story of its own. So, using books, journals, newspaper clipping, advertising, and some artifacts, I hope to discover and share connections that visitors hadn't discovered or thought of before. From a librarians perspective, which I am, these are singular items with a singular voice. As a historian, which I am as well, I hope to unveil the relationship to other materials and other disciplines. I hope to share a number of a-ha moments. One of my favorite quotes from a visiting student was, "I didn't know there was so much I didn't know about radiation." [LAUGHTER] Fourth, in short, a case content is not devoted in this exhibit to the famous people or discoveries, although they're mentioned of course, but to the social, cultural, clinical, and political world that surrounded them or surrounds them. My goal is to draw attention or illuminate small pieces of a remarkably big picture to develop a sense of wonder with the staggering multiplicity of subjects. Fifth, the resources at UW. Exhibit work is always a time to show off treasures, both at Ebling Library for the Health Sciences, where I am, but also from the University Archives, which is headed by David Null, who's here, David, who has a bunch of pieces in this exhibit, and Memorial Library in its special collections, Steenbock, the Agriculture and Vet Med Library, and Wendt Engineering Library are all places where I get material from. 

And also, the fruit of the amazingly rich and full text-based databases that are available on campus, with newspaper clippings and old magazine articles and that sort of thing. And, finally, in full disclosure, and you'll notice that this is my only blatant self-promotional thing, the background of the blue is Lauren Redniss' signature to me in the book because I shared a piece of the exhibit with her, and so she gave me one of the hardcover books and drew her name in it which I thought was really cool. And, finally, full disclosure, I am not a physicist, nor am I a historian of science. So, like Redniss, I often bit off a bit more than I could chew in terms of the science inherent in such a subject. Like her, I am hopeful that the tale has been told sufficiently for engagement for any stripe of visitor that I might get. And I leave it to you, any scientists in the audience, to answer questions on whether gamma rays are biologically hazardous or what is meant by the half life of strontium 90 when we have our Q&A. So, here we go.  The fish, which you saw. First thoughts, before I began to research this topic, I had a few iconic mental images about x-rays, radium, radiation, and radioactivity. Mentioned this topic and I thought, don't get too many x-rays. 

If you're a woman, tell x-ray technicians that you're pregnant. Mad magazine used to sell, and still does, glasses that would help you see through a lady's blouse. Hiding under your school desk would protect you from nuclear fallout. And Hiroshima, Three-Mile Island, and Chernobyl were grim. This is actually a picture of President Jimmy Carter leaving Three-Mile Island a couple of days after tower two had the leak and then the towers themselves and then a sort of poignant photograph of a mother and child, most of which were evacuated the first days, especially if one was pregnant, after Three-Mile Island. My knowledge of this subject was oddly informed, often confused, and, as it turns out, remedial at best. So, as an introduction, this is a class that recently visited the exhibit. This is visiting professor -- standing at the first set of the 13 cases that there are and discovering what the exhibit is all about. I also bring your attention to the posters that are on the right where you can sort of see a portrait of Roentgen that a young man is looking at. Those were lent to us by Greg Spicer who is now retired from the UW Hospitals and Clinics radiology department, and he's the self-appointed historian for the Wisconsin Society of Radiological Technologists, and a lot of the artifacts that were used are borrowed from him which is a luxury I don't often have. 

The posters chronicle the hundredth anniversary of Roentgen's 1895 discovery. So those posters were done in 1995, and they've been really popular with the people who have come because they sort of contextualize the entire exhibit, which is very nice for me. It is truly incredible that a handful of people were responsible for a stunning array of discoveries and applications that eventually changed everything in medicine in many industries and in weaponry. It was also evident that those who popularized science have not always done a complete job of delineating between the origin of the technology, the applications of the technology, and the differences between the technology or the construction of the naturally occurring element like radium and all of that relation to public health. This conflation of subjects and outcomes, x-rays and radiation, radium and radiation, radiation and radioactivity, nuclear energy and radiation, atomic energy and radiation or radioactivity is spectacularly complex. This is another one of the young men from Toshi's class, and this exhibit almost more than any other, I would argue, has people spending really lengthy amounts of time with each of the cases. And you've got to get down low to see it all. So when you look across, everybody's down reading all of the literature that is there, which just warms my heart. My goal tonight is to highlight the process of installing this exhibit, unveiling some of the research that is still undone in this subject, and sharing some of the best stories wrought from the primary material available at UW. There's a process to all this madness that I do. 

It's called my whiteboard, and once I have a title, which I usually run past colleagues, etc, you'll see the title at the top, Fallout: The Mixed Blessing of Radiation and the Public Health, and I'm sorry it's a little light, but it's full of little cartoons. I like to gather the ideas that I have and do a storyboard. Sometimes I try to do a chronological arrangement. In this case, many subjects overlapped, but generally the cases on the left have the older material, then the cases towards the right are the more modern material, and the cases along the top are usually the most modern. Some things have to be cut. I think anyone who does exhibits, like David in the audience, is, generally speaking, you have more than 50% of what you can actually fit into an exhibit. And I would argue that it's better to have more and get rid of it than to be two days until your installation date that you promoted on the web and not have enough. But there's always things that don't make it. And what didn't make it this time were things on science fiction and its relation to how science fiction portrays radiation, radioactivity, nuclear energy, etc. Nearly anything on radium cures is missing. 

There's nothing on things like the Merry Widow radioactive radon gas mine in New Mexico where you can go for arthritic cures, arthritis cures. There's nothing on x-rays parties in Brooklyn in 1899, which is meant to make you really curious but I'm not going to tell you about it. [LAUGHTER] The list is really long of what's not here, but there's a lot of cool stuff that is. So, this is case one. They're each named. This is Discovery. And this Wilhelm Roentgen, 1845 to 1923, who discovered x-rays. He's on the left. Antoine Henri Becquerel, who's from 1852 to 1908. He discovered radioactivity. 

And Pierre and Marie Curie, somewhat famous for the isolation of polonium and radium. They're so influential and I had spent so much time researching them that they felt like family, so I put them in picture frames and they sit on top of the case.  I don't expect you to be able to read a lot of what is here. It's just to give you a sense of how densely packed these cases are in terms of trying to tell these stories and also to incite you to come to the exhibit. And so, discovery, you read the quote up at the top is from somebody who had just written a note about Roentgen in a paper that came out soon after the discovery, November 5, 1895. So, the discovery of physical properties and elements that changed the world as we knew it. We could now see inside. We could now affect physical matter, whether well or diseased, in a way never available to us before. But with all such discoveries, it was not without danger or mishandling. Within months, and keep in mind this was incredibly fast, so Roentgen's November 5, 1895, his first publication comes out early in 1896, and within that eight to 12-week period, the lay press, the science press, the popular press, newspapers, would do clambered for information on this new, rich topic. 

And this is all, keep in mind, without the internet, telephone, etc.  And scientists had already noticed, even within that short time, that there could be adverse effects on both patients and practitioners. Countless experimenters, including Madame Curie herself who went on to suffer pernicious anemia because of her research with radium, were concerned. So, the mixed blessing started from the beginning. We would never be the same diagnostically, therapeutically, or in terms of potential weaponry. With these discoveries came challenges to the public health that we still wrestle with today. And what I want to draw your attention to in this case is William Morton, who wrote the book, I'm not supposed to go past here I'm told, the book in the middle on the x-ray with the hand. He was from New York, and the picture of the Crookes tube, which is to the left of the fish, and the gentleman with the fluoroscopes right below that, and the, what appears to be, naked woman, as it were. Although she was fully clothed, but if you see it up close, you can see all her jewelry. Those are all things that tell the story of the early technology and the early use. 

This is one of the original Roentgen articles on the lower left in German.  There's also a question here which is somewhat provocative which is that there are some people who wonder about a gentleman named Nikola Tesla, whose photo you cannot quite see. He's up at the top. And what I have written about him is the idea of simultaneous discovery and the question of who is responsible for initial breakthroughs has happened more than once in science and medicine. While Roentgen was in Germany, Nikola Tesla, brought to the United States by Thomas Edison, experimented with different currents, energy, and technologies. Some have wondered if Tesla preceded Roentgen in the discovery of the rays and have commented on Tesla's dynamic relationship with Edison. Discussion abounds on the internet and elsewhere among historians. For certain, Tesla was an inveterate inventor, a creative mind, an ingenious force, not unlike that of electricity. The Tesla coil, the AC current, and the notion of cordless electricity are but a few of his inventions and ideas that remain a testament to his inventiveness. As for Roentgen, he was the first, to document, to publish, the make reproducible findings, and in the scientific field, that is the convention of accepted discovery. 

 They loved shoes when they were taking these x-ray photographs. The early experimenters shot or filmed everything from fish to shoes. Imagine that your world, up until 1896, did not include the sensibility or the technology that included being able to see into the human body or any other opaque surface. Something we so take for granted now. The wow factor was enormous. Though some historians have reported it quickly dissipated and was replaced by angst over the side effects, mainly burns, of using x-rays in diagnosis and treatment. Due to the fact that few of us have our own x-ray equipment, although you didn't need much equipment to produce x-rays, and, as a sidebar, that's a whole other discussion on the professionalism of radiology, radiological technicians, and radiotherapists because you could, essentially, create x-rays in your own home, but it was not the best of ideas. There was initially a carnival atmosphere about x-ray technology. In the late 1800s, even a shoe held mysteries to be revealed.  Where's my... 

There you are. Marie Curie, we could go on forever. Very iconoclastic. "All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child." Much has been written about the work and discoveries of Marie Curie, but what resonated for me was her tenacity as a mother in the face of so many adverse elements, all chronicled in her various biographies, not just Redniss'. And she loved to bicycle and garden. Hence, the setting here. It was probably the photograph which followed the tragic death of Pierre in 1906, who was hit by a carriage, that prompted Jacques Curie's comment, "The two little girls are a pleasure to see, but you, how sad you look. You must rally a little, if only for your children." And rally she did, as we will see. Case number two, Now What? So we've got all of this incredible technology and things we'd like to try to do with it, and as the 20th century progressed, so too did the relative sophistication of both x-ray equipment and the uses of that equipment. And very quickly physicians and others began to push the envelope of what it meant to x-ray for diagnostic. 

They added elements like mercury to the veins of hands, and in this case fetuses, to track the arterial system. We are talking about four pounds of mercury in this fetal experiment, but not only that, the lengthy exposure times, which you can't see here but it was at least 20 minutes. Now, you know when you go for an x-ray now and the technician runs out, click, done. Imagine 20 minutes to 45 for full body x-rays is what they were doing at the time. Various aspects of radiography that evolved quickly and often and alternatives came along as side effects were noted. The mix blessing they had to learn through trial and error, and never before had they been able to see congenital defects or skeletal anomalies. And notice, too, that those practitioners who were on the lower right-hand side and the equipment that's on the lower left-hand side, there were no protective shields. So this is just x-rays being done and just emanating out toward the practitioners as well as the patients. So what we'll learn is positioning and focusing become a huge part of the technology as well. I find this reminiscent of a sort of comical Halloween skeleton. 

I asked Greg Spicer, the radiographer, to interpret the inscription in the plate explanation and because it sounded incredibly dramatic. This fetus was positioned to aid diagnosis. The fetus was positioned to open vertical spaces. The preparation refers to setting the current and voltage to the x-ray tube as transmitted to capture the image. And this was a stillbirth. And these atlases were incredibly important to practitioners during that era. Case three, Getting the Lead Out. Before x-rays, surgical precision in removing a bullet was relegated to poking, probing, and trying to remove the metal without further injuring the recipient. Plus, trying to retain physical integrity of the body where the bullet entered and exited. Now they had a way to tell. 

We'll look at a few of these pieces. And I did bring a copy of this book which is up that you could look through after. This was done in 1898 from the medical Department of the US Army in the war with Spain. And I think you can probably read that, volumes of the impact of war. And this was a very important technology to use in terms of helping wounded soldiers.  And this is when I say Marie rallied. She's such a knucklehead. She's so cool. Marie Curie at the wheel of the famous Renault car that she converted into a radiological unit in which from August 1914 circulated from hospital to hospital. So, it wasn't enough that Marie Curie discovered radium and was awarded two Nobel Prizes. 

After the death of Pierre and while still raising her children, she assisted in the World War I effort. She trained herself how to do diagnostic x-rays, fashion trucks into portable radiological units, and trained a number of soldiers how to take and read x-ray plates. And one of these, I believe it's a Renault, is in a museum in Paris. Madame also trained a number of soldiers how to take and read x-ray plates. One of UW's professors was among the soldiers she trained as part of the American Expeditionary Corps. That's what the newspaper clipping is about. His name was Dr. Morris Hall. He was a physicist at UW after the war. He left in about 1955. And what I'm trying to discover is whether or not he is one of the people in that photograph. 

So I need to find a contemporary photograph of him, and then see if he's in with Madame Curie. As far as we know, this is the only photo that exists of the American Expeditionary Corps. So there's a little UW connection. We've got a couple more. This is just a quick schematic of x-ray trucks. So these three trucks have been outfitted to perform x-rays, and then they can go right into the surgical suite and then into the ward for recovery. And this is from World War I, about 1918. Case number four, To Heal. This is more about how radium was used for cancers at the turn of the 1900s and into the early '20s. And the reason I included this to show you is that we found this treatment form in our pamphlet file, which is uncatalogued, and I was excited by the prospect of identifying this as being contemporary with Madame Curie. 

And I queried my professional group of historical librarians, one of whom referred me to a librarian friend of hers at the Institute -- in Paris. And through the modern technology of a scanned, not x-rayed, image, I asked her if she could identify and date this form. And she'd actually had a similar one, and we were able to date it to about 1925, and Marie Curie died in 1934. So I was very excited to think that Madame was in the hood, as it were, when this form was produced. There's a historian named Richard Mold who does a remarkable job at figuring out how all these old technologies and old treatments were used with radium and radiotherapy. And this was just a remarkable one. The circles indicate corks, and those corks were saturated with radium and then introduced into the uterine cavity, which is hard to even begin to imagine now, and then left there for 120 hours. So, imagine what the side effects might have been as well. The cure is worse than the disease. Perhaps, perhaps not. 

Much has been written on the history of radiation therapy, using x-rays, and radiotherapy, using radium, for the treatment of skin condition, rodent ulcers, and many types of cancers. Many of the pioneers we've become familiar with, the Curies, Becquerel, Finson, and many others, began publishing in the archives of the Roentgen Ray and the American X-Ray Journal at the end of the 1800s, early 1900s. Along with the usage of x-rays in radium came a slew of technological enhancements. Sometimes that still continues to this day. Surely these patients were thankful for the new treatments, but the pieces in this case show the growing tension between the treatments and the side effects of those treatments. Such therapies did often come at a cost. This is a bit of an enigma in the case because I didn't have any place to put it. There is a 1941 Chevrolet video on YouTube called X-Rays Inside Information which suggests that x-rays were used not only by doctors to find objects in children, like candy, money, keys that they had swallowed, but also by police to find material in suspicious looking boxes or cars, I'm thinking Prohibition. This Crookes tube predates that video by about 30 years, but it's fascinating to imagine how it was used for police work. And if anybody knows how RR Millner from the Highway Police and which highway, it's not necessarily from Wisconsin even, please let me know. 

Case five, It's Complicated. The artifact in the middle, which you can sort of see, I'll point it out here. This glass tube. Let me go back here so I don't lose my place. It's a gas tube. The chamber from the top filled with chemical. When you no longer see chambers like this, you're into the era of the Coolidge hot filament tubes, first produced in 1913. So, this is a bit older. Chemical chamber on gas tubes, the chemical chamber was a regulator thought to enhance the vacuum in the tube which made for better production of x-rays. These early tubes were not very consistent in x-ray output. 

Chemicals used were platinum, mica, potassium carbonate, or asbestos. And this is also from the Radiologic Technologist Society. The x-ray tube sat inside the glass housing, and the lead glass shielding for the x-ray tube protected the x-ray. And this is somewhere between the teens and the '20s. The rest of the case is about the evolution of realizing there were problems with radiation exposure, both to patients and to technicians and providers, and eventually restrictions were put in place to protect those groups.  This is one of the pieces in this. It's an advertisement borrowed from the Engineering Library in Popular Science, and there was a time when people very much wanted watches with luminous dials. And they were hand-painted by young women, mainly in New York but also in Illinois, and you can still buy them on eBay, actually, but they're not producing them the way, they're not producing them and they're certainly not producing them the way they used to. This is a cartoon from the Her Sunday Supplement in 1926. The figure of death holding a dish of mesothorium paint. 

The worker, which was dubbed in a recent history done on this subject as a radium girl, would swirl the paintbrush in her mouth to get a tip on it, dip it into the paint, put it back in her mouth after she had committed it to the numbers. Those young women began to develop thyroid problems, leukemia, bone density issues, etc. The industry balked for years until they started using stylets, and then eventually the technology of luminescence changed as well and they didn't have to use the paint. Another crusader, besides those that were trying to help the young women with the radium paint, is Alice Stewart. I'd always wondered about those signs one sees when getting an x-ray: Let the technician know if you think you are pregnant. It was a woman named Alice Stewart in the '50s who brought attention to the problem of x-raying fetuses when in utero. They were being x-rayed just to see what the position was, to see how far they'd grown, at any point during the pregnancy. And she suggested that it contributed to childhood cancers, that once the children were born they were developing leukemia and other problems. And it took almost seven years for her to convince the medical community, which she did with a large study. And then, also, ultrasound came in the '70s, which helped her cause as well. 

Fine tuning. While the radiotherapy could be successful in stemming the original cancer or dermatological conditions, radiation dermatitis or radiodermatitis would become associated with prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation. These dramatic photos, of which there are many more in the case, shows the extent to which the skin can be destroyed, needing reconstruction with plastic surgery, sometimes amputation. While radiodermatitis in still a concern in radiotherapy for cancer, new technology and state of the art equipment has resulted in improved treatment modalities, thereby expanding traditional treatment paradigms and exploring new ways to handle this as well. The red goggles, lent to me by Greg, were worn by a radiologist or physician to accommodate the eyes for fluoroscopy. They were used from the '30s through the '60s, then image intensifiers and TV monitors came in. Protection. This is from Popular Mechanics magazine, June 1925, on loan from the Engineering Library. We looked at issues of protection and side effects in case five. There's a bit more in this case. 

The Popular Mechanics article bring home the idea that it wasn't only the patients who had burns and radiodermatitis, the practitioners and scientists, those practicing and those doing research, were prone to life-threatening maladies and disfigurement from working with radiation and radium. On a different note, the equipment and machines being used were becoming increasingly sophisticated. I'll show you here.  This is the piece that the young man was looking at so intently. And it seems to really have a dramatic effect on people when they read it. And that's these needles, here in the neck, that were filled with radium for thyroid problems and some other neck neoplasms. And most people, when they come to look at this, lean over the case and go like this. Really? That's how they did it? And these whole body scans were, not scans, x-rays, are sort of reminiscent of the ones in the early case of the fetuses, but these are grown people with osteo, various orthopedic and osteogenic abnormalities. And part of the reason I chose this was because positioning was so important, both for instituting the needles or the probes that had the radium in them to try and target the cancers, as well as the actual positioning. There are whole atlases on just how a body should be positioned for the best focus of the rays as well as to get the best diagnosis or the best treatment. 

And we have this wonderful piece here. We have not only the book that was done in 1949, the atlas, but also we were given the proofs, and I brought one here for you to look at, of the photographs that were actually used in the layouts for those books. So, that's a special treat one doesn't often get to see. UW, local illumination. Over here I draw your attention to Charles Bardeen, who many of you have hard about. He was the first dean of the med school and the dean for a number of decades. He spoke and wrote widely about his research, both on anatomy and on the biological aspects of x-rays. Here are some of his classic publications on x-ray up in the upper left-hand corner. And historian Matt Levens, Matt is a UW alum who is my hero because a lot of how I contextualized this came from Matt's work on the cultural history of x-rays and the popularization of x-rays, radium, and radioactivity, he mentions that scientists often spoke to the public about the mysteries of x-rays and radiation. And there are two examples here from Charles Bardeen. 

That sort of peach colored pamphlet is a speech to the Six O'Clock Club called A Night With Science, which I thought seemed fitting since I'm here for the Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I just thought that was really cool, that connection. So that is Charles. But I wanted, there's a piece, and Walter Cannon was very important with barium enemas, which are used to get good gastrointestinal x-rays. And this is one where I thought further study is needed and is a good example of what visitors bring to an exhibit. History of Science professor Richard Staley, who's here at UW, read the quote from Bardeen, which is highlighted in yellow and I would never expect you to be able to read that, but I'm going to read it to you. So, Bardeen is mentioning his studies that refer to x-ray's effect on cellular structure. "Many defects attributed to heredity are doubtless due to malign influence which affect the new organization at its earliest stages. At the present time, mankind can probably accomplish more for practical eugenics by careful nurture begun even before conception than by any attempt to perfect the human race through selective breeding." This is February 19, 1914, well before the Third Reich and all of the framing of eugenics that some people know about eugenics in terms of the Third Reich. That same month, in the training school bulletin, Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin at the time, expressing what Professor Staley called the progressive attitude, also in February of 1914, "We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if knowledge were applied. 

We know enough about disease that if that knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases," keep in mind, 1914, "would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years. We now know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation." This seems a world of difference between these two gentlemen. Both here, both commenting on an extremely provocative subject, and both Professor Staley and I thought that was something well worth exploring. He had never seen the Bardeen quote, and I had never seen the Van Hise quote. So, we're very excited about that. We're historical geeks.  And then this, which is this wonderful story. As a visitor suggested, "Boy, UW dropped the ball on this one." And we have David Null to thank for these letters. So, the story goes that Marie Mattingly Meloney, editor of The Delineator magazine, raised funds to by Marie some radium. Marie Curie had no radium left after World War I. 

Nearly all the money coming from women in America in an effort called Marie Curie Radium Fund. UW's dean of the graduate school, Charles Slichter, was asked whether we could bring Madame to the University of Wisconsin when she visited the US to pick up the radium. It seems that they missed a great opportunity. As Madame came to the US with her daughters, Irene and Eve, who are on the right, she visited Washington, DC, where she met President Harding and picked up the radium. She then stopped at a number of east coast schools and Northwestern in Evanston, not that far away, then traveled to the Grand Canyon without coming to UW. The women of Madison did raise $147.50 and sent a delegation with a UW banner, including Alice Van Hise, the president's wife, to one of the events in New York City. If only we had a photo of those nine women and the banner, which, David, we need to find. One visitor wondered if it was the fact that it seemed like a publicity stunt, so UW did not approve, or wondered if there was any sexism involved, as Marie was just a woman scientist, even though she had two Nobel Prizes. There's no conclusive evidence in the UW Archives. So, that begs some study too. 

The more modern Wisconsin's idea of radiology. There's a great book by John Jenkins called To See and Save: A History of the Department of Radiology. A lot of this is taken from that. He suggested that UW's Department of Radiology's early emphasis was in the therapeutic uses of radium and radiation, as opposed to diagnostic radiology which began to burgeon a few years and collaborations later. One of the early landmark therapeutic works out of the departments was Pole's clinical Roentgen therapy. The UW Medical School began using x-ray equipment soon after the 20th century, but the department itself didn't being until 1928 under the direction of Ernst Pole. Pole recruited Lester Paul, who became chairman in '57. Juhl and Paul published their landmark Essentials of Roentgen Interpretation in '59, and Juhl became chair in '64. In 1958, the Medical Physics program began under John Cameron. Cameron was interested in a program in nuclear medicine and began a collaboration with Halvor Vermund in the Department of Radiology. 

In 1981, a freestanding Department of Medical Physics was created in the School of Medicine and Public Health. And that Essentials of Roentgen Interpretation was published until 1998. '98 was the seventh edition and co-edited by Janet Kuhlman who is still currently with UW's Department of Radiology, and it's still considered a seminal textbook in the field. You can't mention UW without WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and another way we get material for exhibits. A friend this booklet from WARF at a flea market. It is nowhere on campus in any collection. It will be after the exhibit. As far as I can tell, it's from 1933. It wasn't even copyrighted. And the sentiment still holds true. 

The medical community still worries about people getting enough vitamin D, and the public still worries about irradiated food. Keep in mind it's not the milk that's irradiated, it's the meal that the cows are given that's irradiated. And I think that's still true.  We were very proud of our million-vault radiation therapy unit. This is a high school class in the 1950s. It was used for cancer treatment prior to cobalt 60 units in the '50s and linear accelerators in the '60s and now. Cobalt 60 units had that radioactive isotope in a large round head and was used into the '70s. Until the late '60s, radiologists did both diagnostic and therapeutics. Then radiation oncologists and therapists split off as an additional specialty. UW's Department of Radiology has made substantial contributions to the field, including the development of digital subtraction and geography in the '80s, magnetic resonance and geography in the '90s, and promising cancer diagnostics and therapeutics in the new millennium. 

You might have seen recently a collaboration with GE that's being with the School of Medicine and Public Health. The department is proud to have catalyzing imaging research by starting the first independent Department of Medical Physics, which I mentioned just before with the father of medical physics, John Cameron. Case nine, Revelations. One of the cases that resonates most with visitors. This is a fluoroscope. It's about this tall in real life. There's one at the Wisconsin Historical Society. If you are of a certain age, you will remember going to Buster Brown shoe stores or places like that, we have affirmation in the front, and standing inside of that sort of hole in the bottom of the device, equipment, and then your feet were irradiated. The salesman was looking through those funnels at the top. There was no shielding. 

What they figured out was that a shoe salesman was exposed to 37,929 percent more radiation a year than a nuclear power plant worker. And when they started studying this from a consumer aspect, they found that there were people that were having thyroid dysfunctions, leukemia, other kind of cancers that they could directly relate to the overuse of this equipment. And they were used in Europe as well. Case number 10. This is a remarkable book from the University Archives here at UW. One of UW's physicists, Julian Mack, went to Los Alamos for the ignition of the Trinity test explosion, the first atomic bomb that was detonated. Thanks to David for sharing this compilation of which I'm only going to share a couple of pictures here. But they were still photographs taken from following the detonation. And Mack hoped to make a film using the stills, but we've still not been able to ascertain if the film has been made. It's a remarkable compilation of 50 black and white photographs, which you'll see a couple of here. 

The other piece that resonates most in this exhibit is this big detonator or switch. Everybody wants to push the buttons. They don't because it's under glass. It's about this big. And probably the best part about this is the story of how I got it from David. And it illustrates the trust between curators. Can you read this? The switch was used to turn on and off the electric power in connection with the atomic explosion work carried on at Los Alamos. It wasn't used to actually detonate the bomb because the electricity needed to be off. And then it was kept in President Fred's office for a period of time. But I was at the University Archives looking at the UW radiology department material, I had spent about two or three hours there, I had had enough of primary material, and I said to David, I don't even think I'm going to do the whole physics thing or the whole bomb thing. 

I've got enough clinical information about the effects of the bomb. I think I'll just go with that. I'm not even going to look. I'm not even going to ask you. And he said, so you don't want the switch? [LAUGHTER] And I said, what switch? And he said, the switch, etc, etc. And I thought, well, you have to fill out paperwork and he's got to go get it out of storage and he's got to ask a few people. And he walked about 12 feet away from me and opened up a cabinet and took it out. And then I said, well, don't you think we should maybe wrap it up because it was Obama's second visit to campus and I was going to be on the 80 bus riding with a switch. And so he did find a bit of bubble wrap, and I didn't have my backpack with me. I had my purse that was shaped like a chicken. 

And so I put the switch inside the chicken, and the chicken and the switch and I went back on the 80 bus to the Ebling Library, and now it is safely in the display case. And that is how curators trust one another and move important artifacts back and forth between their libraries. [LAUGHTER] And nobody can tell anybody, and you have to take that off the film, Bruce. No. [LAUGHTER] So this is one of the remarkable photographs. We almost need no words. This is right after the Trinity was exploded. The contrast between the life altering event and the simple language, enhanced by the stark, nearly newsreel font, is incredibly impactive. One of these had the Washington Monument superimposed on it showing the height. And then there are others. 

But it's an extraordinary image.  This is not the best photograph because they're very shiny and it's hard to get a good picture, and I've actually reproduced it up on the table if you want to read it. But there's all of that knowledge of iconic images, like the mushroom cloud, and I didn't even realize how a mushroom cloud forms because, fortunately, we've only had five of these atomic bombs. But it forms like that big dome, and then it inverts itself up into the mushroom cloud. It doesn't explode as a mushroom cloud. And you can read more on the table if you'd like. So, simply illustrated, this is at 10 seconds. It's gotten bigger than the Washington Monument. It's now bigger than the Empire State Building, and the fallout, the debris, is as tall and thick and dense as the Chicago Merchandise Mart.  And then it forms that iconic mushroom cloud. 

And as Oppenheimer said, translating the Sanskrit, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  And indeed it caused diverse meteorological effects. Three weeks later, the Japanese had told our government that they would never surrender. Based on the Trinity test and the order of President Truman, the bombs were dropped August 6th and August 9th, 1945. First Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then two explosions in December in the Bikini Atoll. Most believe this case has clinical articles on the aftermath. 90,000 to 100,000 were killed outright in Hiroshima. Another 74,000 in Nagasaki. Native peoples from, is it Bik-ini or Bi-kini? Bikini. Thank you. >> The swimsuit was named after it. 

>> Yeah. That's what I thought. Thank you. Bikini could return home after tests at the end of 1945, but many developed radiation poisoning and thyroid cancer. Japan continues to study the rates of congenital anomalies, cancer, disfigurements that came as the result of the bombs. I didn't have room for this story on the Hiroshima Maidens. This was a group of 25 young Japanese women who were brought to New York in 1955 by Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review and an outspoken advocate of nuclear disarmament. They were brought for plastic surgery for reconstruction of keloid scars that had left when the bombs blasts left burns. As of 2009, 235,569 --, those  who were living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the bombings but survived, were still living, their average age being 75. So, this case covers a lot of that in terms of clinical material. 

UW's own intellectual historian Paul Boyer, who died last year, wrote one of the most revealing books on the bomb's impact on our collective psyche. I was particularly interested in the note on the negro scientists and went on to find some other articles in the African American community's involvement with the bomb. Most of those are in the Fallout case, actually, an area that certainly invites more studies as well. Case 11, Survival and Soul Searching.  This is about fallout shelters, duck and cover. It's a fascinating world, and we have lots of interesting quotes in it about how people felt about the fallout shelters. And one of them is from a family that had a whole community meeting about building a fallout shelter, and then one of the mother's said, but who are we going to keep out? And so they decided not to build one. And that was something that resonated a lot in the Life magazine article that's here. And in terms of duck and cover, I just had a fascinating quote from a school of nursing professor who suggested that when she was told that she would have to get under her desk, her house was directly across the street from the school, and she was convinced for, as she said, years that every time she tried to cross that street, the bomb would drop directly on her from the sky before she made it to the other side. And there are a lot of volumes but not as much as I think should have been done from newspaper clippings, literature, songs, plays, etc, about this impact on the psyche of the United States. 

On October 6, 1961, President John F Kennedy advised American families to build bomb shelters to protect themselves from atomic fallout in the event of nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. He assured the public that the US Civil Defense Program would soon being providing protection for every American. Only one year later, true to his fears, the world hovered on the brink of full scale nuclear when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted over the USSR's placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the tense, 13-day crisis, American's prepared for nuclear war by buying up canned goods and completing last minute work on their backyard bomb shelters if they did indeed build them. The yellow fallout protection booklet we actually have here at UW. Has these wonderful late '50s, early '60s graphics. But what I found in this and found in all the other ones I looked at was that they never mention bodily functions. [LAUGHTER] And so, very much like, my very favorite book in the world is Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, and if you know that book, there was the person up on the big rod who roller skated around and around and around during the Depression attempting to earn money. And the only thing that the young boy wondered at the bottom of the pole was, what does he do when he has to do his business? And so, I kept thinking about that while I was going through all of these. And keep in mind that basically you were only supposed to be in there for seven to 14 days, but even that produces a number of bodily fluids. 

And there's no attention to that, which I found interesting. >> Actually, there is right there on that graphic. It's the lower left of the right-hand page, sanitation of medical supplies, you see toilet. >> Right. Yes, but not what's to be done with it. >> Oh. >> Yes. [LAUGHTER] Because you're not supposed to go out. >> That's right. >> Yes. 

Thank you. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] There's very little room for whimsy in this exhibit. But, as I mentioned at the beginning, there are the x-ray goggles, and there is a bit of serendipity here which is kind of interesting. I'm just going to read you this quickly, if you can't read it. Made of plastic glasses frames with cardboard lenses with small holes cut in them, that's what you see through, there's a feathery material that goes across the holes which diffracts the light and creates a fuzzy, shadowy multiple image. This is supposed to simulate how your hand, or whatever, would look through an x-ray machine. Endless fun. But apparently not particularly sustainable. The original version of an optical illusion glasses was patented by Fred Wiedenbeck of Glenrock, Wisconsin, in 1909. 

These subsequent x-ray specs were improved by Harold von Braunhut, also the inventor of the amazing sea monkeys, which you wouldn't think would have much of a connection with radiation and radioactivity. However, the serendipity of discovery, what I found out by putting the word artemia, which is the Latin word for brine shrimp which is what sea monkeys are, into Google was that scientists have taken the eggs of brine shrimp to outer space to test the impact of radiation on life. And so, my husband, who's in the audience, said, so, it's sort of like the cannery in the coalmine. Hence, the phrase artemia in a coalmine. And they were flown on the US biosatellite to Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 and on a number of Russian flights. So there is a relationship between sea monkeys and fallout, the mixed blessing of radiation in the public health. And as we get to the end, the atomic quandary. If we return to the original theme of mixed blessing and concentrate on the role we know best, that of health sciences, then we must end with a group like the Physicians for Social Responsibility and other healthcare professionals who still tirelessly advocate for a world without nuclear proliferation. They know that if there is a nuclear exchange, they and the people they care for will be in an unprecedented state of emergency. We created a world in which there is potential for nuclear destruction, including radioactive fallout and radiation poisoning, but we also have thoughtful colleagues who work tirelessly in the hopes that such an event never occurs. 

This case also includes a poignant reminder of Chernobyl, where, unlike Three-Mile Island, people have been unable to return. Although, there is a move afoot to open it up to tours within a 30-mile radius from the meltdown. And an essay about Fukushima as well. This is not, as somebody suggested, it looks sort of Pompeian, as though the child had been hit with radioactive fallout in the building. That's graffiti that's in Chernobyl that an artist has been studying to see how the elements actually deteriorate the graffiti in the buildings because nobody has lived there for a couple of decades.  In the interest of time, I'm going to find my arrow. Where'd it go? The keyboard is right in front of where I'm always looking. This map was lent by the Geography Library via history graduate student Dana Freiburger. You can see the larger rendition in the first case. It has captured the attention of many visitors, especially the most recent generation, who, interestingly, have a more intimate notion of terrorism, these post-9/11 students who worry more about biological warfare and terrorist attacks than atomic bombs and their fallout. 

We have a few artifacts. This is a fluoroscope, which is designed by Thomas Edison originally. Compared to generating images on x-ray film, the use of the fluoroscope resulted in higher doses to the patient and doctor but less expensive. Because this unit was held on the head via strips, it permitted hands-free use. I've got a couple little pictures down here of what it looked like, which was a decided advantage for a physician in the operating room. The front end of the fluoroscope, here, can be flipped up so that the physician could see without having to completely remove the fluoroscope. And when the screen was flipped up, the physician had the option to see through the red screen, visible in the photograph at the right. Even if the room were brightly lit, the red screen would insure that the physician's eyes remained dark adapted.  Who doesn't love to tan? These are from eBay. A sunlamp from the '40s-'50s and some advertising. 

Remember the WARF and the vitamin D. But, of course, we've found since that that's not always a good idea. And more iconic images. This is a big x-ray film envelope which people don't carry around anymore, but those of a certain generation did used to carry their films from practitioner to practitioner inside a big envelope like this. These are the things we didn't fit. The politically incorrect atomic bomb cake. [LAUGHTER] Just a little over a year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this was a colonel who was in charge of Operation Crossroads, and it was an occasion to make the disbanding of the joining Army/Navy task force number one who organized and oversaw the post-war atomic tests in the Pacific. It was picked up by the Washington Post, and a Washington, DC, pastor saw the bomb cake photos in the Post, deemed it obscene, and much editorializing ensued. I also wasn't able to do music and video games, especially my son mentioned Stalker, Fallout, Mass Effects. All of those video games that are apocalyptic, radioactive treatises which, I would argue, also lead to some of the confusion about radioactive realities. 

I didn't include zombies because maybe they're passe by now, but I didn't include them. And we don't have anything on science fiction. There's an incredible array of science fiction that covers this subject, but we didn't have room. And, also, I didn't cover much on food and radiation. More than a year and a half after an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, many fish in the area contain levels of radioactive cesium that are just as high as they were soon after the disaster. This was in October of last year. And fitting to end with a graphic of an x-ray hand, since we saw an x-rayed hand in case number one, and the current international logo for informing consumers that food has been irradiated. It comes from the room radura. It's derived from raduration, in itself a --, combining the initial letters of the word radiation with the stem duras, the Latin word for hard or lasting. Interestingly, the FDA radura logo, the leaves are open. 

So I'm not sure why. So, parting thoughts. "Be curious about people and more curious about ideas, Marie Curie. In a recent discussion about radioactive and fallout, UW historian of science Richard Staley suggested that Redniss investigated two subjects: love and radiation, both invisible. Both made visible through her graphic storytelling, artifactual material, and her cyanotype printing process. On some level, what you see when you come to see Fallout is my love of history, of the serendipity of discovery, of sharing the pieces of the amazing two- and three-dimensional resources we have on campus, all indicating, dare I say, the notion of seeing. Seeing that these technologies, therapies, and environmental realities have the power to heal as well as the power to destroy. It is that balance that we must continue to appreciate. Just think about that sunshine on your face. It feels good unless you forgo the sunscreen. 

And finally, food for thought. This is Marie Curie to Norris Hall, that physicist that she helped train in World War I: "There's always something new. The possibilities in the field of radioactivity are unlimited." "I couldn't believe her," Hall said. "There had been nothing new for several years." This is 1914. "I didn't think there ever would be. How wrong I was. Today, some 36 years later," this was '55, "we can still say the possibilities are unlimited." And I would argue that that is still very much true. And the last frame of Julian Mack's Trinity photos. "The end." [APPLAUSE]