Varga Benedek szerk.: Orvostörténeti közlemények 149-157. (Budapest, 1996)

KISEBB KÖZLEMÉNYEK / ESSAYS - Jeszenszky Sándor: Gondolatok Alexander Béla (1857—1916) plasztikus röntgenképeiről. A röntgen-sugár felfedezésének 100. évfordulójára

IRODALOM Ruhmer Ernst: Funkeninduktoren (Leipzig, 1904) 180—185, 208—210 old. Gergő Imre: A plastikus X-sugaras képek tudományos és gyakorlati értéke (Budapest, 1907) Alexander Béla: „Plastische Röntgenbilder" In: Ernst Sommer (szerk.): Röntgen-Taschenbuch (Leipzig, 1909) 1-6 old. Zemplén Győző: Az elektromosság és gyakorlati alkalmazásai (Budapest, 1910) 665—667 old. Gocht Hermann: Handbuch der Röntgenlehre (Stuttgart, 1911) 238—240 old. Rosenthal Josef: Praktische Röntgenphysik und Röntgentechnik (Leipzig, 1925) 43—46 old. Grigg E.R.N.: The Trail of the invisible Light (Springfield, 1964) 198, 648, 651 old. Bugyi Balázs: Hungarian Medical Radiology Past and Present (Budapest, 1978 17—19 old. Zsebők Zoltán: Orvosi radiológia (Budapest, 1979) 10, 151 old. SÁNDOR JESZENSZKY, Ph.D. director Hungarian Electrotechnical Museum H—1075 Budapest, Kazinczy u. 21. SUMMARY The article revisits the special X-ray photo technique of a famous Hungarian radiologist Dr. Béla Alexander from the last decade of the 19th century. Alexander was probably the first who invented a technique which could make two dimensional X-ray photos to look like an immage of a real solid body in all three dimensions. (Note that the Hungarian «plasztikus» is not equivalent of the English sense of the adjective «plastic»: i.e. unnatural, or unreal, but used quite contrary in referring solid and deep three-dimensional images.) As a practicing physician studying the bone structure of human body Alexander was driven to develop a new technique whereby he could precisely settle the exact shapes and forms of bones. His new method, presented at the congress of the Deutsches Röntgenge Seilschaft in 1906, was based on subsequent copying the same picture when different parts of the same body were shadowed and lit according to the different position of the lighting. (Fig. 9 illustrates the technique.) The final outcome was an image which presented the whole object with its surroundings in a three-dimensional form. His method became more disputed than accepted after its first presentation in 1906. The author refers to a good number of German publications from the same year, most of them suggesting various similar techniques. The method after all remained inadequate to determine the exact place of a foreign body but was a very useful tool for presenting many of the small, hardly visible specialities and deformations of human bones. Alexander's method remained, nevertheless, widely disputed in terms of its scientific achievement during the 1910s. The author concludes that although Alexander's images were the outcomes of a complex application of artificial photographic techniques, these pictures provided important additional support for the easier recognition of already known information. In contrast to the paradigms of early 20th century science, when it was not regarded scientific, today we can come