X-Posing Corruption of the Body and the Body Politic

REVEALING RAYS: X-POSING CORRUPTION OF THE BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC

J. Scott Brennen University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

ABSTRACT Drawing on theoretical insights from science and technology studies, this historical analysis addresses how late 19th century American science journalism helped translate the X-ray, as a new media technology, from the physics laboratory into the public sphere. Described as a form of light, the X-ray was given the moral and physical agency to see into concealed spaces and reveal and cure the ailments within, whether of the body or the body politic. As part of a general epistemological framework distinct from photographic realism, these assumptions about the possibilities of knowing can also be seen across public culture at the turn of the twentieth century from politics, to journalism, to philosophy, to popular culture. Ultimately, this study highlights how newspaper coverage helped construct the X- ray as a heterogeneous public object while contributing to a larger set of understandings about what can be known and done in public life.

KEYWORDS science journalism, journalism history, science and technology studies, new media technology, X-ray, civic epistemology, civic ontology, history of science, history of media

WORD COUNT: 8035

Author Biography J. Scott Brennen is a graduate student in the school of media and journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research, sitting at the intersection of journalism studies, media studies, and science and technology studies, explores how technological change shapes and is shaped by relations among science, journalism, and the public sphere.

INTRODUCTION When Z. K. Lecher, editor of the Vienne Presse, published the first news article about the X-ray on January 5th 1896, he saw something in the discovery that Revealing Rays its originator, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, did not. In his scholarly article “On a New

Kind of Rays,” Röntgen was more concerned with the X-ray’s strange physical properties. While he did note that “of special significance in many respects is the fact that photographic dry plates are sensitive to X-rays,” which produce “shadow pictures,” Röntgen saw this as a means of making a “permanent record” (Röntgen,

1958: 44) of the X-ray’s strange characteristics. Although Röntgen immediately recognized the extraordinary implications of his discovery for physics, it took the newspaper editor to suggest the device could revolutionize medicine as well

(Glasser, 1958: 59).

This historical analysis of the early American science reporting that grew out of Lecher’s first article revealed the way that newspapers, rather than simply reporting or transmitting news of the discovery, helped translate the X-ray from the physics laboratory to the public sphere. Described in terms of light, the X-ray was seen both as facilitating a new form of photography and as a potent moral actor.

Ultimately, newspapers helped determine and define not only what the X-ray could do, but also what it was. Simultaneously, from the beginning, the X-ray was constituted by and helped constitute a more general set of epistemological assumptions about the possibilities of seeing into concealed spaces in order to reveal and cure the ailments within, whether in the body or the body politic.

Translated into the language of photography, this framework presented an alternative to a realism that understood photographs as indexing the real. On one hand, this epistemological framework was visible throughout early newspaper coverage of the X-ray, as the X-ray was given diverse scientific, medical, and moral

2 Revealing Rays powers. On the other hand, this epistemological framework can be recognized extending beyond discussion of the X-ray, helping to constitute what Jasanoff has described as a civic epistemology (Jasanoff, 2011: 249), and appearing in discussion ranging from that surrounding the muckrakers, to the work of Dewey and Freud, to both art and popular culture. Ultimately, this case highlighted how early science journalism not only helped shape a new media technology as a public object, but also contributed to a larger set of understandings about what can be known and done in public life, while underscoring the more general relationship between the social construction of new media technologies and public meaning and reasoning systems.

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW

The Discovery of the X-Ray and its Coverage by the Press

In the final weeks of 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen invited his wife, Bertha, into his laboratory. Asking her to place her hand on a cassette containing a photographic plate, Röntgen activated a piece of experimental equipment he had been tinkering with for more than a month. When Röntgen developed the plate and revealed a crude image of the bones in Bertha’s hand, Bertha “shuddered at the thought that she was seeing her skeleton. To Mrs. Röntgen, as to many others later, this experience gave a vague premonition of death” (Glasser, 1958: 39).

Eager to share news of his discovery, Röntgen sent out a manuscript titled

“On a New Kind of Rays, a Preliminary Communication” to the editor of the

Würzburg Physical Media Society on December 28th 1895. By New Years Day,

3 Revealing Rays

Röntgen was distributing copies of the article to his colleagues, one of whom was so excited by the work that he showed the manuscript to a friend at a party. The friend brought the paper and the included photographs to his father, Z. K. Lecher, the editor of the Austrian newspaper the Vienne Presse, who “lost no time in exploiting the enormous news value in the story of the rays’ discovery” (Glasser, 1958: 59).

From Lecher’s article the news spread globally, as news outlets touted the X-rays as a revolutionary physics discovery, a miraculous medical device, and a new communication medium. One estimate suggested that as many as 1000 newspaper and journal articles and 50 books were published about the discovery in 1896 alone

(Golan, 1998: 442). The British Quarterly Review observed at the time that the discovery had “completely and irresistibly taken the world by storm” (quoted in

Natale, 2011: 265) and touched off an “X-ray mania” (Cartwright, 1995: 107) that would last for more than a decade.

Mathew Lavine has observed that within the first eight years, newspaper coverage of the X-ray was defined by, on one hand, a “pure fin de siècle techno- optimism” and, on the other, a “wariness on several levels about the intrusiveness of rays, and a backlash against their sudden ubiquity on the pages of newspapers and the lips of casual conversationalists” (2012: 593). Many reporters appeared to express a fearful excitement for the “'dark light' that could penetrate flesh as easy as glass, and produce photographic images of the skeleton…” (Golan, 1998: 442). Early coverage frequently focused on how X-rays facilitated a new form of photography— both powerful and somewhat unsettling.

4 Revealing Rays

The late 19th century was a time of significant change for photography

(Trachtenberg, 1990). On one hand, inventors and companies were redesigning photographic technology; on the other, publics and commentators were reimagining and rearticulating both what photographs were and what they could do (Davis,

1995). Many scholars have connected public imagining of photography to the wider movement of philosophical realism. Scholars such as William Ivins (1969) or Roland

Barthes have claimed, “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.

From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here...” (1982: 80). Realist accounts stressed that an image served as a

“photographic referent” which referred to the “necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph” (76).

More recently, however, scholars have critiqued a necessary connection between photography and realism on both theoretical and empirical grounds. John

Tagg has argued that,

we have to see that every photograph is the result of specific and, in every sense, significant distortions which render its relation to any prior reality deeply problematic and raise the question of the determining level of the material apparatus and of the social practices within which photography takes place (1988: 2). Which is to say that photographs’ “evidential force” is only valid with “certain institutional practices and within particular historical relationships” (4). On a more empirical level, historian of science Jennifer Tucker has observed that “Victorian attitudes to photography were much more complex than they initially seem”

(Tucker, 2013: 6).

5 Revealing Rays

Associating X-rays with photography, but not necessarily with a photographic realism, newspapers claimed that X-rays had a number of amazing abilities, from aiding the education of medical students, to curing drunkenness, to alchemy. Some came to associate the X-ray with the occult, believing that it could reveal the soul (Natale, 2011: 265; Cartwright, 1995: 121). Others picked up on the

X-ray’s ability to see through clothing and drew associations with sexuality and pornography (See Cartwright, 1995). One poem in the magazine Photography concluded with the stanza:

I’m full of daze, Shock and amaze; For nowadays I hear they’ll gaze Thro’ cloak and gown—and even stays, These Naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays (Quoted in Glasser, 1958: 81).

In a more general sense, these commentators were suggesting the X-ray had unique epistemological implications. While this connection maybe at first seem radical, a number of communication scholars have considered the relationship between media technologies and epistemological frameworks. In her seminal history When Old Technologies Were New, Carolyn Marvin highlighted the ways in which the late 19th century electric media focused and catalyzed conflicts amongst competing expert and “public” epistemologies (1990). Marvin observed that

“Perhaps the most general question any epistemology addresses is the nature of the relationship between man and the world, what kind of world it is in which man finds himself, what counts as eternal verity and what is variable contingency in the world, and what level of control is possible in it” (150). More recently, Fred Turner has

6 Revealing Rays traced media objects and formats in shifts in public culture as it concerns contemporary digital media, linking, for example, the Whole Earth Catalogue (2010) and the multi-screen display (2013) to the epistemological underpinnings of the

World Wide Web. More relatedly, Nancy Cartwright in Screening the Body: Tracing

Medicine’s Visual Culture (1995) implicated the X-ray, along with the movie camera and other medical technologies, in “the emergence of a distinctly modernist mode of representation in Western scientific and public culture –a mode geared to the temporal and spatial decomposition and reconfiguration of bodies as dynamic fields of action in need of regulation and control” (xi).

Whatever the specific epistemological power of the X-ray, many commentators quickly recognized the medical applications of the X-rays—not only for diagnostic imaging, but for treatment as well. Interestingly, Lavine suggests that the rapid distribution of X-ray devices across hospitals and physicians’ offices contributed to the wide diversity of medical powers attributed to X-rays (2012:

594). Early access to X-ray devices permitted many local doctors to run their own experiments, which then served as the basis of (occasionally inaccurate) claims about the medical powers of X-rays.

Yet with so much experimentation, it was not long before many began to worry about the potential medical dangers. Initially this mostly concerned the painful burns that resulted from too much exposure to the radiation (Lavine, 2012:

596). Apprehension took a more serious turn after Thomas Edison, who had been experimenting with X-Rays, was quoted in the New York World as saying, “Don’t talk to me about X-rays…I am afraid of them. I stopped experimenting with them two

7 Revealing Rays years ago, when I came near to losing my eyesight and Dally, my assistant practically lost the use of both of his arms” (Quoted in Lavine 2012: 596). Edison’s assistant,

Clarence Dally, later died from his injuries—a fact that was widely publicized by the physician Mihran Kassiban, who publically campaigned against X-rays by

“documenting his own gradual amputations and health decline until his death in

1910” as a result of exposure (Pena, 2005: note 111).

Science Popularization and Journalism in the Late 19th Century

In order to better situate American newspaper coverage of the X-ray, it is useful to briefly consider some of the changes occurring in science journalism at the end of the 19th century. Although it has a long history in American media (e.g.

Kreighbaum, 1967), the popularization of scientific research in both periodicals and newspapers intensified after the Civil War. Historian John Burnham linked the widening of popularization to a larger shift in the way scientists (and publics) thought about science. Whereas the increasingly professionalized scientists in the mid 19th century had many reservations about popularization efforts, historian

Robert Bruce noted that by 1875 the president of the largest scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “freely avowed the purpose” of popularization (Bruce, 1987: 354). Indeed, many scientists at this time had come to see popularization efforts as part of what it meant to be a scientist

(Dunwoody, 2008: 16). Similarly, some increasingly believed that knowledge of science was instrumental in producing capable, enlightened citizens (Bruce, 1987:

8 Revealing Rays

From the 1840s on, there had been a steady growth in the public’s demand for popular discussion of science. This shift was associated with the founding of a number of science-directed periodicals, such as Popular Science Monthly in 1872, which offered some of the strongest scientific reporting (Cantor & Shuttleworth,

2004). Newspapers also increased science coverage. In 1876 the New York Times began a weekly column on scientific findings, as did several other national newspapers around that time (Bruce, 1987: 354). Of course, this is not to suggest that science reporting was free from errors and sensationalism, which in some ways still defined its coverage. Many outlets continued to include “pseudoscientific hoaxes and fads, which had grown very popular in the 1840s, echoes of which linger in literature, notably in the novels of Hawthorne and the tales of Poe” (Bruce, 1987:

In many ways, both science popularization efforts in general, and newspaper coverage of science specifically, changed significantly in the last few decades of the

19th century. There has been some disagreement about what exactly happened to science coverage in newspapers in the late 1880s: some historians have argued that coverage dropped off, evidenced by the end of weekly columns in national papers and increasingly infrequent coverage—perhaps in part as a result of the furor around Darwin subsiding (Bruce, 1987). Others have suggested that, at least by the end of the 1890s, there was greater journalistic attention to science and health issues (Spratt, 2001). In either case, the 1890’s saw the rise of what Burnham called

“newspaper science” (1987: 152), a heavily sensationalized form of coverage associated with yellow journalism. While there remained a large popular demand

9 Revealing Rays for science coverage, newspapers often emphasized “Gee Whiz!” reporting— sensational and often-made up stories about medical or scientific wonders

(Krieghbaum, 1967: 26). This “newspaper science” was defined by “a combination of editorial whim, hoax, newspaper-financed stunts, garbling and faking of details when truthful information was scarce, plus the occasional job well done’” (Burnham,

1987: 172).

For Burnham, “newspaper science,” should be recognized explicitly as a

“deterioration” of science coverage (1987: 154). Aside from including misleading or simply wrong information, “by the 1890s, American newspapers had turned scientific developments into ‘news’—not just interesting or uplifting background or such general stories as might appear in magazines, but ‘events,’” a shift he associated, in part, with the influence of the telegraph (154). Burnham also pointed to the discovery of the X-rays and radio waves as both signaling and propelling this shift. Similarly, Burnham argued that coverage at this time also began to distinguish between science and technology. As newspapers stressed and celebrated applied science and technical development, scientists themselves increasingly pursued

“pure research,” exacerbating conflicts between scientists and journalists. Indeed,

Krieghbaum argued that “newspaper science” “so shocked and intimidated the scientific community of that day that it was at least a full generation before all but the bravest scientists would permit themselves to be interviewed by newsmen”

(1967: 26). This meant that scientists increasingly refused to serve as sources for news stories, only worsening the quality of coverage.

10 Revealing Rays

Rather than suggesting that a “deterioration” of science coverage scared away scientists, other scholars have proposed internal shifts in scientific practice increasingly kept scientists away from the news. While scientific research had seen increasing specialization and professionalization for several decades, these trends intensified greatly at the end of the 19th century. Increasing specialization “left scientists little time to engage in popularization,” while increasingly professionalization “pushed scientists to see themselves as individuals more skilled than, and apart from, everyday people. As scientists developed their own languages, their own training regimens and their own reward systems, communication with

‘others’ became a low priority” (Dunwoody, 2008: 16). Indeed, there was some indication that universities and professional scientific organizations began punishing scientists for involvement in popularization efforts (16). Ultimately, by the turn of the twentieth century, although there was much popular demand for science coverage, few newspapers either used professional scientists as sources or offered factually sound reporting.

METHODS

This historical analysis explored the initial announcement and construction of the X-ray in American newspapers. Much of the scholarly consideration of both the newspaper coverage of science at the turn of the twentieth century and the coverage of the discovery of the X-ray has focused on major urban newspapers. In contrast, this project explored the broader coverage across a diverse range of

American newspapers. Though the “X-ray mania” spread throughout the western

11 Revealing Rays world, this project remains narrowly focused on American coverage and discussion of the X-ray as a means to better understand American journalism history around the turn of the century. To do so, the country was roughly divided into four regions: the (North) East, the South, the Midwest, and the West. Using the Chronicling

America archive, a large collection of digitized newspapers curated by the U.S.

Library of Congress, states were selected from each region, such that each region included roughly the same number of newspapers. Vermont was selected from the

Northeast, Tennessee and North Carolina from the south, Minnesota from the

Midwest, and Texas representing the West. The papers in this collection included a mix of local and regional papers, as well as both urban and rural papers. Using the search feature of the archive, each newspaper was searched for articles published between January 1st and March 31st 1896, that included any mention of Röntgen,

Roentgen, Cathode, X-rays, rays, etc., weeding out false positives. In all around 250 unique articles were collected and qualitatively textually analyzed, more or less evenly distributed across the five states. Although this project investigated American news, there was strong indication that several European articles were deeply influential in shaping American coverage. As the first newspaper article about the X-ray, Z.K. Lecher’s piece in the Vienne Presse both shaped later discussion of the X-ray, and directly informed journalists about the discovery on both sides of the Atlantic (Glasser, 1958: 59).

The London Daily Chronicle article described below was specifically cited by American newspapers across the country in initial announcements of the discovery. Believing that accurately situating American coverage required considering these non-American pieces, this project included these articles in the analysis.

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NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE X-RAY IN CONTEXT

After Röntgen submitted the manuscript of “On A New Kind of Rays” to the

Würzburg Physical Media Society on December 28th 1895, news of his work spread rapidly. American newspapers in states as distant as Texas and Minnesota reported the discovery a little more than a week later. Many of the initial announcements were not based on Röntgen’s manuscript, but rather on a single article from the

London Daily Chronicle published on January 6th (Glasser, 1958: 59).

Many American articles, reprinting large sections of the Chronicle story, announced “a New Light for Photography Which Penetrates Opaque Substances”

(The Daily Herald, 11 January 1896, p. 1). Photography, of course, has always been deeply associated with light. For example, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce, who in the late

1820s completed some of the first experiments into what he called “heliography,” observed that the process “consists in the automatic reproduction, by the action of light, with their gradation of tones from black to white, of the images obtained in the camera obscura” (reprinted in Trachtenberg, 1980: 5). Yet as a “new light,” (e.g. The

Little Falls Weekly Transcript, 6 March 1896, p. 8), X-rays facilitated a new type of photography that had a different relationship to light. Indeed, some articles picked up on the X-ray as enabling a new form of photography defined by the absence of light. These articles suggested that X-ray photographs were better seen as a “new shadow photography” and that “The method obtaining results with this new apparatus is exactly the opposite of that of photography, and therefore has been termed skotographs or radiographs” (The Princeton Union, 12 March 1896, p. 6).

13 Revealing Rays

Employing a similar logic, others called the X-ray photographs “skiagraphs” (The

Saint Paul Daily Globe, 5 March 1896, p. 1) or “shadowgraphs” (The Bryan Daily

Eagle, 16 February 1896, p. 4). These names pointed to the fact that X-ray photographs were produced “in the Dark,” (The Burlington Weekly Free Press, 27

February 1896, p. 1) and worked not by capturing reflected light, but by recording the shadows produced by blocking it.

Whether based on an idea of the X-ray as a “new light,” a “dark light” (Golan,

1998: 442), or shadow, much of the initial X-ray coverage recognized further differences between the X-ray and traditional photographs in terms of serving as forms of evidence. For Niepce’s heliograph, as in photography more generally, light was stabilized and captured on photosensitive paper or film. This technical process of drawing with or capturing light has often underwritten the connections between photography and realism. For these scholars and commentators, “photographic images were thought to be devoid of human agency and formed solely through a chemical process dependent on ‘recording light-based information onto a reactive surface’” (Brennen, 2010: 71-2 quoting Newton, 2001: 6). As Barthes articulated above, this mechanical process was seen to underwrite photographs’ ontological status as an unproblematic link between the real and the sign.

In contrast, however, much of the early coverage stressed the ability of X- rays to penetrate or see through objects rather than simply to capture and index the real. Across the first three months of coverage, newspapers widely noted X-rays’ ability to “Penetrate Wood, Flesh or Other Organic Substances” (The Burlington

Weekly Free Press, 16 January 1896, p. 11). Articles offered a diverse list of entities

14 Revealing Rays that X-rays could see through, from walnuts to minds, to pockets and pocketbooks, and even to women’s hearts. One poem from the Tennessee Lawrence Democrat mused:

Now the timid, doubting suitor, By Professor Roentgen’s art, May, before he speaks, discover If she has a marble heart (27 March 1896, p. 4).

Just as this poem imagined that X-rays offered the “timid, doubting suitor” a means of protecting himself by seeing through the wily artifices of a hard-hearted woman, coverage frequently stressed the work or function that X-rays performed in seeing through. Or more specifically, coverage often stressed the good or moral work that X-rays achieved in penetrating these various substances and fixing problems within. As some form of light, X-rays were specially endowed with moral agency, able to, in their penetrative power, find flaws, cure disease, root out corruption, and of course, protect suitors from “marble” hearts. Arguably, the moral power of X-rays’ ability to penetrate was grounded in the particular ontological association of X-rays and light. As Derrida as observed, the “metaphor of darkness and light (of self-revelation and self-concealment), [is] the founding metaphor of

Western philosophy as metaphysics….the entire history of our philosophy is a photology, the name given to a history of, or treatise on, light….” (2001: 31).

Similarly, as philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu has shown in more detail, thinkers from

Plato to Merleau-Ponty have drawn on an “image of light as an invisible medium that opens up a knowable world” (1998: 3). At the same time, light has not only been a means of knowing, but also a force of good. For example, for Descartes, the “lumen 15 Revealing Rays naturale,” the human capacity of pure reason that derives from God, can “bypass the vagaries of the senses” (4) and reveal the world.

Within the early coverage, newspapers frequently asserted the X-ray’s ability to cure or fix hidden problems, in part by displaying to the public or bringing what was hidden into the open. The sections below discuss three arenas in which newspapers specifically identified the moral function of X-rays in being able to see through what is hidden and cure problems: material objects, the human body, and politics.

Material Objects

Throughout the coverage, articles asserted, “By the Rontgen discovery, pictures may be taken of the interior of solid substances” (The Worthington Advance,

6 February 1896, p. 4). Rather than simply pointing out X-ray’s epistemological power to penetrate into solid objects, a number of articles claimed that in seeing through, X-rays have the power to fix or repair structural defects. For example, one article cited Thomas Edison as noting that X-rays will make significant contributions to metallurgy, “in determining the existence of secret flaws in metal” (The Saint Paul

Daily Globe, 13 February 1896, p. 7). Another article suggested X-rays might help

“find flaws in Guns and Armor” (The Essex County Herald, 14 February 1896, p. 1).

Similarly, several articles reported experiments that tested “real and imitation diamonds with the X rays” (St. Johnsbury Caledonian, 6 March 1896, p. 8). Such experiments, as a Minnesota paper noted, “will be a severe blow, however, to those aspiring folk who sport sparklers that are the creation of art” (The Saint Paul Daily

16 Revealing Rays

Globe, 28 February 1896, p. 4). Of course, it wasn’t just crooked jewelers that would be exposed through the new discovery, “If all this is true there will be no excuse in future [sic] for a grocer selling eggs with chickens in them for ‘guaranteed fresh eggs’” (The News and Citizen, 13 February 1896, p. 4).

Human Bodies

The power of X-rays was not limited to eggs, diamonds, and alloys, however; one article referred to the new invention as the “human microscope” (The Saint Paul

Daily Globe, 1 March 1896, p. 19). One of the first plates that Röntgen produced and circulated was of his wife’s hand, and as noted above, it did not take long for newspapers to recognize the medical potential of the discovery. Very quickly surgeons saw that X-rays could be used to reveal structural problems hiding within the body and also to help guide surgery in correcting those problems. Articles reported that X-rays allowed surgeons to locate and remove bullets (The Essex

County Herald, 24 February 1896, p. 1), needles (The Vermont Phœnix, 1 February

1896, p. 1), scissors (The Bryan Daily Eagle, 14 March 1896, p. 4) or other foreign objects. Other articles reported that X-rays allowed surgeons to diagnose and fix bone problems, as was done for German Emperor Wilhelm II (The Austin Weekly

Statesman, 19 March 1896, p. 3).

It wasn’t, however, only structural defects or embedded objects that X-rays could reveal and treat, articles frequently heralded Röntgen’s discovery as being able to “enable Physicians to discover the hidden ravages of disease” (The Saint Paul

Daily Globe, 22 February 1896, p. 7). These diseases included “tubercular growths”

17 Revealing Rays

(The Saint Paul Daily Globe, 22 February 1896, p. 7), stomach cancer (The St. Paul

Daily Globe, 25 February 1896, p. 5), “sarcoma” (The Houston Daily Post, 7 March

1896, p. 6), or ultimately any “disease as it bounds along the thrilling nerves or lurks in the burdened muscles” (The Fort Worth Gazette, 24 March 1896, p. 6).

Most telling, perhaps, was that there were many reports that the “new light” could be a means of treating bacterial disease. The bacterial theory of disease had been formulated only a few decades earlier, and there was still a great deal of controversy and uncertainty as physicians, scientists, and “hygienists” negotiated the meaning and ramifications of the new theory (Latour, 1993). Yet, one newspaper noted, “If the theory of these doctors is correct, the cure for consumption, cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid and typhus fever and smallpox is at last discovered,” (The Shiner Gazette, 19 March 1896, p. 2) not to mention blindness (The Austin Weekly Statesman, 19 March 1896, p. 7) and hydrophobia (The Saint Paul Daily Globe, 13 February 1896, p. 1). The “theory” referenced here, was less the germ theory of disease, but rather a theory about the particular power of X-rays.

We know that if we could throw a flood of sunshine into the lungs of a consumptive, the bacillus tuberculosis family living therein, and bringing death to the system would soon die themselves. They cannot survive sunshine (The Saint Paul Daily Globe, 26 February 1896, p. 8).

As a form of light, X-rays were endowed with the moral power and goodness of sunlight: the power to cleanse and heal. There was at this time already a tradition in mainstream medicine of “heliotherapy,” the treating of certain ailments such as osteo-articular tuberculosis with light (Segrave, 2005: 15). Indeed, by the beginning

18 Revealing Rays of the 20th century, many believed that “ultra-violet (UV) rays were the most useful in treating disease and steps were taken either to filter sunlight, or to use artificial light that was rich in the rays of shorter wavelength” (Segrave, 2005: 15).

Newspapers were able to draw on existing ideas about the moral and medical benefits of light to constitute X-rays as a medium through which physicians could lay bear the dark recesses of the body, bringing to light and destroying the sickness and disease therein.

Politics

Just as coverage frequently endowed X-rays with the capacity to expose and destroy disease in the body, newspapers repeatedly suggested that X-rays could do the same for politics. Very quickly, many newspapers took up the X-ray as a metaphor for efforts to expose or bring to light the dark and hidden (mis)deeds of politicians. Journalists and editorial writers adopted this metaphor in several different ways. Some saw the X-ray as representing the healing deep scrutiny of transparency, of bringing what was hidden into the public’s gaze. One article, with the sub-headline “Let There Be Light,” described a city council meeting in St. Paul

Minnesota: “The alderman, grabbing eagerly at the possible good results of a new application of the ‘X’ ray, wants the interior workings of the council meetings photographed and held up to public view” (The Saint Paul Daily Globe, 14 March

1896, p. 3). Others used the X-ray to refer to the act of exposing the hidden motives of individuals. Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar was quoted in one article as proclaiming, “The senator from Ohio [John Sherman] is a man of penetration, of

19 Revealing Rays great scientific attainments…but I doubt whether he has so mastered the science of the X rays as to penetrate my brain and ascertain my motives in offering this resolution” (The Saint Paul Daily Globe, 11 March 1896, p. 6).

Many others explicitly adopted the X-ray as a symbol of exposing and rooting out corruption. Texas Senator Roger Mills, fervent supporter of “forcible occupation of the Island of Cuba in order to aid the Cubans in securing local self government” is quoted as claiming in a speech on the senate floor “Now, if I had the X rays…and used it in examining the pocket of the writer of that letter [against intervention], I would find sugar stock there” (The Austin Weekly Statesman, 26 March, 1896, p. 5).

One tongue-in-cheek article observed, “Pocket [X-ray] cameras may enable enterprising reporters to discover the true inside of a deal, and there would be no help for legislators with boodle in their clothes” (The Princeton Union, 5 March 1896, p. 7). Another editorial suggested that Democratic Senator Benjamin

Tillman is an extremist in many of his views and goes wild, but the fact remains that he sees a great deal of oppression, bribery and corruption with his one sharp and fiery eye, which seems to be suplied [sic] with cathode rays when looking into the wrongs of the people (The Bryan Daily Eagle, 12 March 1896).

A short article in the front-page bulletin of the Saint Paul Daily Herald, mused about the upcoming Republican National Convention, “Suppose the Rontgen camera should be turned on the pockets of the Southern delegates when they arrive at St.

Louis and again when they go away!” (9 February 1896, p. 1).

As with bacteria in the body, the underlying assumption across much of this coverage was that in bringing political corruption into the light of day—or the public’s gaze—it would be destroyed. This underscored the moral association of the

20 Revealing Rays public’s gaze with that of sunlight, as though to suggest that just as X-rays as a moral light can expose and destroy the hidden disease of the body, the public’s gaze, once laying bare corruption, will root out political disease. Ultimately X-rays as light have the capacity to cure not only disease in the human body, but in the body politic as well.

INTERPRETATION

Translating and Constructing the X-ray

In her book How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of

Facts, Candis Callison (2014) looked at the ways in which different social networks or communities translate scientific facts or findings into their own “vernaculars,” or culturally defined meaning systems. Callison, citing Kim Fortun (2001), recognized that the public meaning making of scientific fact is stuck in a “double bind,” of

“maintaining fidelity to science and expanding beyond it” (5, emphasis in original) in becoming meaningful to different publics. Early newspaper treatment of X-rays offered a similar story. By connecting the X-ray to pressing public issues, from political corruption to disease to diamond fraud, journalists were not only publicizing and informing the public about a new scientific discovery, but were actively re-constituting the X-ray and the X-ray photograph as publically meaningful.

Yet, unlike Callison’s book, this case concerned the translation of objects, rather than facts, into public vernaculars. Correspondingly, rather than simply being a question of working out public meanings around the X-ray, arguably science coverage helped shape what the X-ray could do—scientifically, medically, and

21 Revealing Rays metaphorically. As Bruno Latour (E.g. 1999) has argued echoing the early pragmatist philosophers, what something is remains a question of what it can do.

This is to say, in shaping the functions of X-rays, early coverage helped to shape what the X-ray was as a heterogeneous public object, simultaneously scientific, medical, social, political, and moral.

The clearest example of this was the way in which it was Z. K. Lecher, the editor of the Vienne Press, rather than Röntgen or another physicist or physician, who first recognized the medical potential of the new discovery. At the same time, this paper has argued that by identifying the X-ray as a form of light and therefore imbued with a certain moral force, newspapers were able to assign a range of functions and applications to the new device, from metallurgy to politics to medicine, further helping define what the X-ray was as a public object.

In some sense, this case shared similarities to narratives found in the social construction of technology (SCOT) tradition (e.g. Bijker et al., 2012), which might have described the press in this case as simply another “social group” negotiating the form and function of a new technology. However, while press coverage of the X- ray clearly shaped scientific and medical uses of the X-ray, it also shaped its potential as a metaphorical resource. Coverage did not only influence the material or physical form and function of the X-ray, but also its public life as a symbolic resource as well. In this sense, rather than simply serving as another social group, media served as a “meta-process” that was “an irreducible dimension of all social processes…that is grounded in the modification of communication as the basic practice of how people construct the social and cultural world” (Couldry, 2012:

22 Revealing Rays

136). This is to say, when it comes to constituting public objects, media arguably held a unique power.

As described above, science journalism at the end of the 19th century has been often described as sensationalized, offering what Burnham has called

“newspaper science” (1987: 152). This assessment has led some scholars to pass over early newspaper science journalism, suggesting that the real history of contemporary science coverage begins with the founding of the Science Service in

1921 (see Nelkin, 1987). However, this case demonstrated that even “bad” science journalism still did important work in constituting public objects. Rather than simply assessing the facticity of science journalism, scholars would be better served by recognizing the role that science journalism played in constituting the public or civic ontology of scientific and technical objects.

Penetrating X-ray Epistemology

The work that newspapers did in constituting or fashioning X-rays as complex public or civic objects was deeply tied to arguments about the particular ability of X-rays to see through and reveal hidden depths, and in doing so, to fix or cure moral or medical corruption. In this way, the publicness of X-rays as civic objects was deeply enfolded in claims about their ability to help us know the world.

In Designs on Nature, Sheila Jasanoff described “civic epistemologies” as

“culturally specific, historically and politically grounded, public knowledge-ways,” or “entrenched cultural expectations about how knowledge should be made authoritative” (2011: 249). For Jasanoff, civic epistemologies existed at the national

23 Revealing Rays scale and can be compared between countries. Even still, this analytic presented a useful way of thinking about the epistemological infrastructures what of what

Callison called “vernaculars.” While Callison was more interested in how scientific facts were translated into different vernaculars, this project highlighted how, as an object endowed with epistemological capacities, X-rays could be seen as both being grounded in, and contributing to the “public knowledge-ways” of different public’s vernaculars.

In particular, this case has suggested that X-rays were enfolded in a particular epistemology associated with seeing through, bringing into the open, and in doing so fixing or curing ailments. Importantly, this framework stood distinct from the realism frequently associated with photographs, in which photographs were seen as un-problematically indexed to the real (e.g. Barthes, 1982: 76). Instead of simply recognizing that photographs index the real, this alternative epistemology contended that photographs uncover the real. More, in uncovering, making public, and bringing to “light” hidden perversion, be it corruption or disease, X-rays served as a means of fixing or curing personal, social, and political ills.

Rather than being unique to the X-ray, this epistemology, as shown above, had long historical roots in the persistent distinction between light and darkness.

Moreover, elements of this framework can be recognized in disparate areas of public culture around the turn of the twentieth century. Identifying elements of an

X-ray epistemology in the public cultural surrounding the X-ray is not meant to suggest that the X-ray directly produced or caused this wider framework. Instead, as described above, this case suggested that American newspapers worked to

24 Revealing Rays construct the X-ray in dialogue with an existing set of assumptions about ways of knowing the world. At the same time, however, there was reason to suspect that the

X-ray itself helped support and reproduce this framework in a relationship that

Jasanoff has described as “co-production” (see 2004: 2).

Before christened as “muckrakers” by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, advocates of the “new journalism” targeting political and capitalist corruption, were simply known as “exposers” (Baker, 1945: 184). In his autobiography, Ray Stannard

Baker, in fact, contrasts their new methods to the “world of haste and superficiality that was the newspaper,” by quoting then-famous journalist Arthur Brisbane advising “if you would succeed in journalism, never lose your superficiality” (93).

Lewis Hine, who was published in McClure’s and other Muckraking journals at the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, saw his “social photography” as deeply effective in addressing the social problems of the day. In a talk he gave at a

1909 conference, Hine observed:

The artist, Burne-Jones, once said he should never be able to paint again if he saw much of those hopeless lives that have no remedy. What a selfish, cowardly attitude! How different is the stand taken by [Victor] Hugo, that the great social peril is darkness and ignorance. ‘What then,’ he says, ‘is required? Light! Light in floods!’ The dictum, then, of the social worker is “Let there be light;’ and in this campaign for light we have for our advance agent the light writer—the photograph. (Hine, 1909: 112)

Here, Hine identified the limits of photographic indexicality in the figure of Burne-

Jones, who confronted the realist depiction of suffering and turned away from social intervention. Instead, Hine offered photography as a medium of light—a light that 25 Revealing Rays can not only illuminate but also burn away the social ills caused by “darkness and ignorance.” Hine focused on the curative moral power of transparency, of bringing to light. Similar to how newspaper journalists saw the X-ray as being able to cure bacterial disease by letting in sunshine, for Hine, the light of publicity managed through the camera would mend social disease.

Hine’s progressive ethic of social reform was deeply indebted to the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, under whom he studied at the University of

Chicago (Willmann, 2008: 224). In addition to a commitment to social reform, it was possible to recognize an epistemological connection between the X-ray, Hine, and

Dewey’s account of perception in his famous 1896 article “The Reflex Arc of

Psychology.” As Hickman has observed, the new understanding Dewey advocated left perception as fundamentally active.

For Dewey, however, vision ‘handles’ its object; it is ‘nonlinear.’ It is not inert and passive, but active and exploratory. The image of vision that Dewey presents is not that of a ray entering the eye from an object, but rather that of a probing tool that moves and checks and interacts (Hickman, 1992: 25).

In Dewey’s account, vision itself shared significant similarities to the X-ray, “More technically stated, the so-called response is not merely to the stimulus; it is into it”

(Dewey, 1896: 359, emphasis in original).

Freud’s critique of contemporary psychology afforded, perhaps, an even clearer connection to an X-ray epistemology. Akira Mizuta Lippit, in his book Atomic

Light (Shadow Optics), specifically connected the X-ray to Freud’s efforts to explore and reveal the subconscious, observing “It requires a form of perception not yet

26 Revealing Rays known, the ability to see through opaque objects and into the body’s depths” (2005,

Of course, this X-ray epistemology was not limited to professional and philosophical discourse, but could also be recognized in both art and popular culture as well. A number of scholars have made the connection between the X-ray and early 20th century art movements, such as Cubism, grounded in the X-ray’s revealing of the “inadequacy of human sense perception” (Henderson, 1988: 325).

For many artists the X-ray offered “a new kind of light that allowed a painter to go beyond the preoccupation of Realism and Impressionism with surface appearances…to concentrate on the essence of form” (329).

Even still, one had to look no farther than H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man to see the epistemological concern generated about and around the X-ray. Although the novel’s villain noted that the secret to his transformation was “not those Röntgen vibrations—I don't know that these others of mine have been described” (2006:

106), there remained a clear epistemological anxiety in the villain’s ability—like to

X-ray—to penetrate where it shouldn’t unobserved, and to reveal what is normally kept hidden. But perhaps the clearest example of X-ray epistemology in popular culture was best seen several decades later in the comic book Superman. For

Superman, X-ray vision not only served as a powerful weapon against evil, allowing the hero to see through nefarious plots, but also occasionally aided the work of his alter ego Clark Kent: newspaper reporter.

CONCLUSION

27 Revealing Rays

This project has investigated how the press helped translate one scientific object, the X-ray, into public vernaculars. While, as Callison (2014: 2) observed, a similar translation of facts may be constrained by a “double bind,” in which facts must be made meaningful to publics while maintaining their scientific facticity, it has remained unclear how objects navigate such constraints. Objects, though material and durable, can gain new capacities and can transform once they leave the laboratory (Bijker et al., 2012) in ways that facts cannot. As described above, making the X-ray publically meaningful involved a re-forming or re-constituting of what the

X-ray was and what it could do. Just as Jasanoff has offered civic epistemology to describe culturally grounded public knowledge-ways, this project has pointed to civic ontology as a useful analytic. Civic ontology would concern the ways that different publics uniquely co-produce the objects that meaningfully inhabit public life, while simultaneously recognizing the ways objects crystallize or sediment particular assumptions, values, beliefs, or ideas.

Similarly, this project has suggested that American newspapers drew on and shaped a larger epistemological infrastructure in constituting the X-ray as a public object. Without claiming that the X-ray originated this epistemology of revealing, this project has worked to identify this alternative to realism across public life. By situating the discussion around the X-ray within this framework, this project has pointed to the ways in which new media technologies may shape and be shaped by understandings of our capacity to know the world.

28 Revealing Rays

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