That happened two generations ago, and it might be supposed that in the meantime there had been so much advance in popular education, and particularly in the diffusion of scientific knowledge, that such a self-deception on the part of scientists, and blind following by the people, could not take place in our time. Just as soon as Roentgen discovered the X-ray, however, we began to have applications of that wonderful agent to curative purposes. About 1900, scarcely five years after Roentgen's discovery, there was hardly an ailment that some one did not claim to have seen treated successfully by the X-rays. Especially was this true for the chronic and hitherto supposedly incurable diseases. All the forms of malignant disease were treated by the new agent, and some supposedly marvelous cures were reported. Everything chronic was favorably affected--lupus, rodent ulcer, eczema, acne rosacea, even tuberculosis of the lungs. At the time I was on the staff of a medical journal, and the favorable reports came in so thick and fast that it really looked for a time as though the surgery of the future was to be much simplified. It took but a year or two to show us how little of lasting therapeutic benefit there was {45} in the X-ray, in spite of the fact that it is a marvelous agent in its action upon living tissues. At the present moment it is used comparatively little, and its use is gradually diminishing, except for very special limited affections. RADIUM AND RADIO-ACTIVITY When radium was discovered, though it came so soon after the discovery of the X-ray and our disappointment with it, the old story of another pseudo-scientific medical application was told. For a time it looked as though radium might accomplish all that had been promised for the X-ray, though that promise had been so lamentably broken. Then, besides radium, we had brought home to us the whole class of radio-active substances, and their possibilities. The internal administration of radio-active liquids was one of the hopes of therapeutics. We had found it difficult to explain how many of the mineral waters produced the beneficial action credited to them when taken at the spring. We knew that artificially made waters of exactly the same chemical composition, so far as we could determine, did not have the same effect, nor even the waters themselves when taken at a distance from the spring.