Of course,” Hart added, “older machines were not so quiet and convenient.” 1 To a visitor expecting the horrendous it must all seem very drab and uninteresting. Most city bedrooms are noisier and far more uncomfortable than the treatment room. In fact, a good many of our patients cat nap during their treatments. At the end of the treatment, the patient “has heard nothing, felt nothing. In his breezy and popularizing memoir These Mysterious Rays, radiologist Alan Hart describes what a typical patient might experience during a visit to his modern x-ray therapy clinic. This “domestication” of x-ray machines underscored their failure as a modern-day heroic medicine, while reinforcing an emergent understanding of radiation as a subtle, cumulative, and insidious threat. A quarter century later, refinement of the technology had made irradiation safer and more effective, but also made the operation of the machines themselves almost undetectable. As one of the icons of the new scientific medicine, x-rays bore much of the public's expectations for a technological panacea, a belief that was reinforced by the spectacle of their generation and their undeniable effect on the body.

Their bizarre and sometimes overwhelming presentation in the clinic reinforced the contemporary public understanding of x-rays as fantastically potent yet ambiguously helpful. The first x-ray machines were large, loud, sparking, smelly, and ostentatious devices, prone to mishap and injury even when fully under the control of the physicians who, in droves, invested money and prestige in them.

Medical liability with rife generator