God has retained the worst part for himself: the truth.” Ecclesiastes was right, he decides: “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow. With the ability to see all, he is no longer capable of perceiving beauty, and illusion and hope are but bitter memories. His X-ray vision proves too much, though. His X-ray eye assists him admirably in the operating theater, but Schwanthaler is thinking beyond just surgery: “To see inside everything, to penetrate to the very center of matter, to scrutinize the framework that sustains the human membrane and perhaps discover, in those depths, the secret of the soul and the prime movement of thought was a double dream of medicine and philosophy.” Cornelius Schwanthaler, who injects one of his eyes with a serum, “an inoculable substance endowed with the astonishing power of making the eyes accessible to Roentgen rays-the famous rays then impassioning all Europe” (an English translation of the story is included in the 2012 collection The World Above The World, from Black Coat Press). It wasn’t long before the themes of seeing and knowing and perhaps seeing and knowing too much were picked up by a proto-science fiction writer: the French author and Protestant minister Charles Recolin, who in 1896, only months after Roentgen’s discovery, published the story “Le Rayon X” (“The X-Ray”). Dam for an interview-the only interview he granted in the wake of the discovery-the first question Dam asked was, “Is the invisible visible?” The question referred, of course, to the newfound ability to peer inside the living body, to reveal its heretofore hidden frame, but underneath it lay another question, one with deeper, more profound implications: “Is the unknowable knowable?” When Roentgen sat down with journalist H.J.W. The possibility of serving the more prurient interests wasn’t the only way X-rays stirred the public’s imagination, though. Across the ocean, an assemblyman in New Jersey introduced a bill banning the use of X-rays in opera glasses. A London firm advertised “X-ray proof underclothing-especially for the sensitive woman,” and reportedly made a killing with it. To be sure, the discovery caused a bit of a panic among the more decorous elements of late-Victorian society. 1, 1896 issue, the British Medical Journal declared: “The application of the discovery to the photography of hidden structures is a feat sensational enough and likely to stimulate even the uneducated imagination.” The writer’s meaning here was clear: Quite aside from any medical value, the unwashed masses would want to know whether they could use the technology to see through people’s clothes. In fact, the idea of X-ray vision-in which the new technology would enable people to see things they hadn’t seen before, and maybe weren’t meant to see-emerged sooner, within weeks of Roentgen describing what he’d found. Eventually, we even came up with a name for this new type of seeing: X-ray vision. Now it also encompassed that which was previously inaccessible to us. No longer was this confined to unobstructed views of people and things directly in front of our eyes. When she first saw the image, an almost ghoulish rendering of her skeleton stripped of its skin, Anna Bertha herself said, “I have seen my death.” Until then, such a view would not have been possible until after her demise.īy thus opening up our interior selves for inspection, the discovery changed the ways we think of how we see. In the final days of 1895 a German physicist named Wilhelm Roentgen reported an intriguing discovery: the X-ray, a form of radiation that had enabled him to produce an image of the bones inside his wife Anna Bertha’s hand (as well as the wedding ring on her finger). The discovery of the X-ray changed our understandings of seeing
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |