1 Paleoradiology: History and New Developments - Academia.dk

ard of Philadelphia acknowledged that “the advent of
the Roentgen method into the diagnosis of fractures
has created the highest standard by which the results
obtained in the treatment of fracture must be judged”
(cited by Walsh 1907, p 186). Golding Bert urged “that
radiography should be regarded as a subsidiary agent
to diagnosis, and its evidence in cases of doubt and
difficulty should be received with caution, and only
after due interpretation by someone whose experience
warrants his speaking with authority” (cited by
Walsh 1907, p 198). Skiagraphy was coined in April
1896 by a 24-year-old medical student, Sydney D.
Rowland, who served as editor of the world’s first
radiological journal called “Archives of Clinical Skiagraphy,”
which was devoted to new photography in
medicine and surgery. In the preface of that first journal
on radiology, Rowland wrote: “the object of this
publication is to put on record in permanent form,
some of the most striking applications of the new
photography to the needs of medicine and surgery.
The progress of this new Art has been so rapid that,
although Prof. Roentgen’s discovery is only a thing of
yesterday, it has already taken its place among the approved
and accepted aids to diagnosis…the first essays
were of a rough and ready character; week after
week, however, improvements have been made in the
practical applications of the Art which I venture to
call skiagraphy; and, at the present time, we are in the
1.5 Paleoradiology and Clinical Radiology: Historical Development
Fig. 1.11. Magnetic resonance
imaging of Nakht’s
brain
position to obtain a visible image of every bone and
joint in the body…” (Burrows 1986).
This brief review of the literature on radiology in
the early phase of development of x-ray technology
shows there was a considerable corpus of literature
on radiology of bone pathology, indicating the availability
of radiological expertise that paleopathologists
could have used to enhance their attempts to detect
skeletal lesions in mummies or dry bone specimens
from archeological settings. The lack of actual interaction
between radiologists and anthropologists/paleopathologists
still plagues the methods and practice of
paleopathology 100 years after the discovery of x-rays
by Roentgen. One hundred and ten years after the first
x-ray study of bioarcheological material performed by
Koenig on a human and an animal Egyptian mummy,
and despite the publication of paleoradiological articles
in numerous and diverse scientific journals, there
is still no single didactic paleoradiology book available
to teach both the method and diagnostic approach
of this discipline. Hence our endeavor to produce this
book to fill this gap.
Although Harris et al. published two unique books
on x-ray studies of royal Egyptian mummies, their
purpose was not to teach paleoradiology, but instead
to offer a kind of radiographic database of mummies
for researchers in the field of Egyptology and
mummy science (Harris and Weeks 1973; Harris and
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