“It is easy now to understand what was happening to Dodd and his contemporaries. In a modern X-ray machine the strength of the current, the quality of the spark, all the conditions, are determined by metrical instruments. In the early days the operator tested his tube and adjusted it by throwing the shadow of his hand on the fluoroscope; by the look of the shadow he judged how the machine was behaving. First he used the left hand until that became too sore, then the right. And until devices were found to focus and confine the rays, the face of the operator was exposed, and sometimes the neck and chest were burned. A limited exposure to the X-ray is as harmless as a walk in the sunlight. It is the repeated, continuous bombardment of the ray that is calamitous. Dodd and the other pioneers lived in the X-ray.” John L. Bauer was the first victim of the X-ray, in 1906. He was followed in 1914 by Henry Green, who, although he knew he was doomed, and in spite of the fact that he had become almost helpless physically because so much flesh had been cut away in amputating cancerous growths, persisted in his work to the end. Major Eugene Wilson Caldwell of the Medical Reserve Corps of the United States Army, the inventor of the Caldwell liquid interrupter and other devices for therapeutic use, lost his life in 1918. Dr. Charles Infroit of the Salpetrière Hospital, Paris, died on November 29, 1920. One of Dr. Infroit’s hands became infected in 1898 as a result of his continuous use of the X-ray, and an operation was performed. After that he had 24 other operations, 22 of them performed in the last ten years of his life, the last on August 1, 1920, when his right arm and left wrist were amputated. Dr. Charles Vaillant, whose heroic services to humanity have made necessary 13 amputations until now he is armless, on February 19, 1923, received from United States Ambassador Herrick the Carnegie plaque, while the cravat of the Paris Gold Medal of the French Legion of Honor was conferred upon the martyr. Physicians say further amputations are inevitable, and that these will result in Vaillant’s death. In 1921, the eminent English radiologists, Dr. Cecil Lyster and Dr. Ironside Bruce, and Dr. Adolphe Leroy of the St. Antonie Hospital in Paris, died martyrs to their noble profession. “All of these men went knowingly to death. Perhaps they did not take their sacrifices in the spirit of the saint, possessed by a vision of suffering humanity. Theirs may have been the ardor of the scientist, the endurance of a worker who hears the challenge of nature’s silence and goes to battle. But in themselves they express the powerful urge of a spirit that longs to see, to feel, to know, and to possess all the mysteries of the universe. It is the same spirit that makes men rebel and agonize for a better order of humanity. These men seem better than the world that produces them. But each of them, when he dies, may pull the rest of humanity a little closer to his level.”