Priority For Radium Therapy of Benign Conditions & Cancer

Abstract

It is often difficult in medicine to assign priorities for original ideas and for first implementation of a new type of treatment or technology, such as radium afterloading. This is certainly true for radium therapy with, for example, conflicting claims from France, Germany and the USA as to who first implemented radium therapy. One must also differentiate, if possible, between the person who had the idea for a therapy and the person who actually implemented the therapy. Such persons are not always one and the same. Difficulties in assigning priorities also sometimes arise from the lack of a published claim in a medical journal and it is almost impossible to find photographic evidence still existing some 100 years after the event. This article tries to solve problems of who were really responsible for the ideas and implementation of radium therapy, including the technique of afterloading.