The simplicity and relatively easy availability of the equipment necessary to produce X-rays meant that many were able to encounter, explore and invent their own excitements with the new discovery. In 1924 he set up the Tricho Sales Corporation, which gave hair-removal treatment to tens of thousands of women before claims for damages from women with appalling tumours caused the company’s collapse in 1930 (Collins 2007, 68-9).

Thus to remove the beard would only require the placing of a Crookes’s tube for a few minutes over the chin before retiring to rest, when next morning the ordinary application of soap and water would complete the operation! Under these circumstances, the “new barber” may not impossibly be one of the many outcomes of the “new photography.” (Anon 1896d, 1296)ĭespite mounting evidence of the dangers of X-rays, Albert Geyser was able through the first two decades of the twentieth century to continue treating women with radiation for excessive hair and other ailments. If the time that elapses before positive baldness was effected could be reduced what an incalculable benefit would Roentgen’s discovery confer on shavers. This provoked the cheerful suggestion in The Lancet that X-rays might have value as a depilatory:

Within months of their appearance, it had become well-known that prolonged exposure of the skull to X-rays (and exposures at this period could be, terrifyingly, of an hour or more) led to hair loss. Indeed, the very dangers of X-rays suggested therapeutic and cosmetic possibilities. The diagnostic possibilities of X-rays were apparent straight away, but its therapeutic uses were also enthusiastically embraced, despite its disappointing lack of effect on bacteria. There will be no need to put a knife into a live animal when a ray will make its inner workings visible’ (Anon 1896b). Human beings were not the only beneficiaries of X-rays: ‘If the Roentgen method of seeing through things pans out anywhere near as well as its friends expect’, suggested Life, ‘we are entitled to hope that it will almost put an end to vivisection. (Anon 1896a)Īnd yet, this reaction did not last long, and accounts and evocations of the X-ray quickly acquired a different temper, as X-rays became associated with life, health, beauty and growth, in this anticipating and complementing the highly positive attitude towards radioactivity in general during the first half of the twentieth century, which many saw as a kind of alchemical vitalisation of matter (Campos 2007). A poem that appeared in Punch in the immediate aftermath of the sensational discovery of X-rays makes the connection clear:Īnd of your grim and graveyard humour. The X-ray saw through time as well as fleshly space, giving us a glimpse of our future postmortem condition, and making it grimly manifest that we already are the skeletons to which we will one day be reduced. Only injury, torture or extreme malnutrition makes the skeleton apparent in life in the same way. It is easy for us to imagine that, when they burst into view in December 1895, and swept across the world during the following year, X-rays must have had just the same kind of unnerving effect, stripping away the flesh to reveal ‘the skull beneath the skin’ (Eliot 1969, 52).

The profession of Mr Venus, the articulator of skeletons in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, gives unease to his beloved: ‘ “I do not wish to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that bony light” ’ (Dickens 2000, 88). Accordingly, this essay is predisposed to and by the last preposition in Serres’s list, as a thinking through the ‘through’. The predominating modern experience, I want to say, is that of being permeated. What is the defining modern experience? We will not find it, I think, where we usually look for it, in desire, power, rationalisation, commodification, constitution of the subject or dissolution of the subject. Michel Serres has argued that, where philosophy has been governed by the prepositions ‘on’, ‘under’ and ‘in’, we would profit from a thought that might let itself be governed by other prepositions, like ‘with’, ‘across’, ‘among’ and ‘between’ and ‘through’ (Serres 1994, 83 my translation). A version of this text was also given as a talk given for the annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, Keele University, March 29, 2008. Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic Steven ConnorĪn expanded version of a text written to accompany Phillip Warnell’s film, The Girl With X-Ray Eyes (2008).

Woman who has xray vision