Medical X-Rays

Eddie McCarthy, a young Hanover resident, slipped himself into a historical footnote when he fell and broke his left wrist while skating on the Connecticut River. Several weeks later, on February 3, 1896, his arm was immortalized in the first diagnostic X-ray examination made in the United States.

The experiment took place in the physics laboratory of Reed Hall, where Dartmouth Medical School Professor Gilman Frost and his brother Edwin, a Dartmouth astronomer, had been working to reproduce the mysterious rays recently discovered by German scientist Wilhelm K. Roentgen. I he Frost brothers had already developed satisfactory pictures of various inanimate objects when they decided to test the X-rays on a human being. The image of Eddie McCarthy's fractured wrist demonstrated the rays' remarkable diagnostic potential.

The vacuum tube and other equipment used in the seminal experiment are on display in Dartmouth's Fairchild Science Center.

Young Eddie's wrist got immortalized by the Frost brothers.