Bombing Cancer: The Troubled History of Radium Teletherapy
|Starts:||03:30 13 Oct 2015|
|Ends:||17:00 13 Oct 2015|
|What is it:||Seminar|
|Organiser:||Faculty of Life Sciences|
|Who is it for:||University staff, Alumni, Current University students|
This seminar is part of the CHSTM Seminars Series Sept-Dec 2015.
CHSTM seminars will be held fortnightly on Tuesdays at 4pm in Room 2.57 Simon Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester, M13 9PL - https://goo.gl/maps/RTFk4 with tea and biscuits from 3.30pm. All are welcome and please feel free pass this list on to interested colleagues. The British Medical Journal presciently opened a 1930 editorial concerning radium therapy for cancer with Chaucer’s paraphrase of “old Hippocras:” “The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharpe the conquering.”
The editorial was expressing apprehension regarding a report by the Radium Commission, which was providing radium and overseeing its use at a number of hospitals including a radium bomb at the Westminster, Hospital London. The bomb effort was so troubling that the commission soon called a halt to mass radium therapy. A controversy arose led by a Westminster surgeon and a member of parliament challenging this decision. A committee of experts was soon established, and after observing some promising efforts in New York, Paris and Stockholm called for an expanded program staffed by experts and equipped with a large radium bomb, soon located at Hammersmith Hospital. The new program developed radium teletherapy to a competitive level until its demise after the Second World War with the availability of Cobalt-60.
This paper follows the development of bomb therapy, while it also interrogates the role of tacit knowledge in the development of medical technologies. For example, the surgeons who dominated the Westminster team understood that their surgical expertise could only be acquired by using the knife under the tutelage of more experienced practitioners. Yet, they had no appreciation that radium teletherapy also required face-to-face transfer of knowledge. In contrast, Hammersmith’s more successful program benefited from the tacit knowledge transferred from Sweden by one of its physicists.
Organisation: Binghamton University, New York
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