experiments you would find time to make would add anything of importance to our knowledge of these rays and their practical application in medicine * * *. Later, when the exact practical value of photography by these rays has been determined, we may want the necessary apparatus in order to assist in the diagnosis of cases occurring in the District, to which the new method may be applicable." 16[1]
That the Museum got its apparatus within 3 months after being turned down, is indicated by a letter of Dr. Joseph S. Wall of Washington, in which he describes an early clinical use of the X-ray. On 10 June 1896, as Dr. Wall recalls, and as the admission records of the Garfield Hospital showed, "a girl of seventeen was admitted to the hospital because of a .22 calibre penetrating gunshot wound of the hip, accidentally inflicted by her brother." It became the duty of Dr. Wall, as a young "externe" of the hospital, "to accompany the patient in a horse-drawn ambulance to the Army Medical Museum to obtain the services of Dr. William Gray," who had been engaged in microscopic and bacteriologic work for the Museum since 1884, and who, Dr. Wall said, had the only Roentgen tube in Washington at that early date (fig. 39). "After the orderly-driver and myself had struggled up four flights of stairs to Dr. Gray's laboratory," he continued, "carrying a rather plump young lady on the stretcher, she was exposed to the X-ray for a period of one hour in order to secure a picture showing the location of the bullet." A satisfactory plate was secured, "even though the tube was activated by a kind of static grindstone," the girl was taken back to the hospital, and the bullet was successfully extracted. 17[2]
Services of Dr. Billings
Midway in the closing decade of the 19th century, in 1895, Dr. John Shaw Billings retired from the Army, after 34 years of service, of which 30 years had been spent in building up the Library, with 12 years of concurrent service to the Museum. Dr. Billings, a mighty man of medicine, went on to a postretirement career of rare distinction. From the University of Pennsylvania, where he occupied a chair in the medical school for a year after retirement from the
- ↑ 16 (1) Castiglioni, Arturo: A History of Medicine. Translated from the Italian and edited by E. B. Krumbhaar, 2d ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1947, p. 1065. (2) Letter, George Sternberg to Walter Reed, 6 March 1896.
- ↑ 17 Letter, Dr. Joseph S. Wall to R. A. Sloan, Army Medical Museum, 13 January 1950. From a story in the Washington Times Herald, 6 October 1954, it appears that there was an earlier use of the X-ray, in the District of Columbia, to locate a bullet accidentally fired into the hand of Carl A. Loeffler, as reported in the Washington Post, 24 April 1896.
