In Marie Curie: In the Laboratory and on the Battlefield, Lawrence Badash gives a fascinating summary of x-ray history with a few darkly comical tidbits:
X-ray instruments were widely marketed. A person could place his hand in an x-ray beam before a luminescent screen and view his own bones through a hooded visor. Thomas Edison, among others, offered this precarious experience as a diversion at amusement parks.
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The element uranium, discovered by Martin Klaproth in 1789 and named after the planet discovered just eight years before (the first planet not known in antiquity) did not seem especially interesting. Its principal use was to give glass or pottery a greenish-yellow tint. Because of uranium’s great density, attempts were made to incorporate it into military armor.
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The same crystals that Röntgen had illuminated with x rays could also be made to glow by radioactivity. Tiny amounts of radium and those crystals, mixed in paint, could make the paint glow in the dark. This luminous paint was applied to watch dials, light switches, and even to the costumes of nightclub dancers. The patrons could also drink luminous cocktails.
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The variety of radioactive medical nostrums seemed endless: pastes, plasters, muds, inhalers, drinking water, and so forth. That few people were injured by this exposure to radioactivity suggests the weakness of the products. The danger was not widely revealed until the 1920s, when some radium watch-dial painters in New Jersey died after “pointing” their brushes on their tongues and ingesting toxic amounts of radioactive paint. But the danger was already known in smaller circles around 1900, when Becquerel received a burn on his waist after carrying a tube of radium in his vest pocket, and Pierre Curie deliberately gave himself a similar burn. Some physicians were alerted by such evidence to radium’s clinical potential in dermatology.
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The x-ray teams were aware, to some extent, of the danger to themselves from radiation exposure, particularly from fluoroscopy. They wore lead aprons and gloves to avoid dermatitis.
One of the chief points of the article is that Marie Curie promoted x-ray diagnosis (on a large scale) in military hospitals during the Great War. How many of these earlier wars do you remember from high-school history class?
Military surgeons were enthusiastic about the “Röntgen-ray apparatus,” and sets were used in military hospitals during Italy’s Abyssinian War (1896), the Greco-Turkish War (1897), the British campaigns at Tyrah and the Khyber Pass (1897) and in the Sudan (1898), aboard a US ship in the Spanish-American War (1898), in the Boer War (1899), the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the Balkan War (1912-13), and in probably every other conflict of that era in which at least one combatant was technologically advanced.