Four
years ago such a procedure would have been considered not only
marvelous but dangerous.
At that time, in Vienna and Berlin, I saw men with hands hopelessly
burned and distorted as the result of merely taking photographic
plates with the X-ray. Then came in lead-glass screens--screens of
glass made with a lead percentage.
Now, as if science had prepared for this great emergency, operators
use gloves saturated with a lead solution, and right-angled
instruments, and operate directly in the ray. For cases where
immediate extraction is inadvisable or unnecessary there is a
stereoscopic arrangement of plates on the principle of our familiar
stereoscope, which shows an image with perspective and locates the
foreign body exactly.
One plate I saw had a story attached to it.
I was stopping in a private house where a tall Belgian surgeon lived.
In the morning, after breakfast, I saw him carefully preparing a tray
and carrying it upstairs. There was a sick boy, still in his teens, up
there. As I passed the door I had seen him lying there, gaunt and
pale, but plainly convalescent.
Happening to go up shortly after, I saw the tall surgeon by the side
of the bed, the tray on his knees. And later I heard the story:
The boy was his son. During the winter he had been injured and taken
prisoner.
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