Museum director Bill Brennan models some antique x-ray protective gear.

ASRT Museum: the X-Ray Museum

Albuquerque, New Mexico

The American Society of Radiologic Technologists Museum would never call itself the X-Ray Museum, although if you want to know about x-rays -- the good and the bad -- then this is the place to go. The museum also touches on other forms of medical imaging, but its primary purpose is to promote radiologic technologists: the unsung "rad techs" of health care.

Early scientists received more x-rays than their patients.

"One of the biggest problems we have is that people consider us to be button-pushers; glorified photographers," said Bill Brennan, the museum's executive director. Bill bristled at the idea that doctors and nurses are the only trained medical professionals who tend to your health. The exhibits in this museum make it clear -- as clear as a modern medical diagnostic image -- that you don't want someone putting radiation in your body who doesn't know what they're doing.

X-rays were discovered by accident on November 8, 1895. Some of the museum's antique x-ray equipment -- control panels and elaborate vacuum tubes straight out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab -- date back nearly that far. Technologists, like farmers, apparently never throw anything away. "I get phone calls all the time," said Bill. "'Hey, I've got this old thing, are you interested?'" Bill usually is.

A line-up of x-ray pioneers includes Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla.

Some visitors, Bill said, are nervous about the museum's artifacts, but x-ray tubes are not filled with mysterious x-ray gas that could leak out. They're vacuum tubes filled with nothing, and only produce x-rays when tens of thousands of volts of electricity are pumped through them. The radiation, Bill said, vanishes when the power is turned off. No one is going to hook up the museum's hundred-year-old hardware to a high-voltage line, although Bill guessed that at least some of the tubes would still work.

Human piggy bank.

X-ray's early adopters learned about its dangers the hard way. The museum's "Martyrs and Safety Pioneers" exhibit remembers a few, such as Elizabeth Fleischmen (RIP 1905), who would x-ray herself to show nervous patients that there was nothing to fear, and did it enough times that she died of radiation poisoning. Another, Mihran Kassabian (RIP 1910), documented his cumulative exposure with photographs of his gradually decaying hands, which are also on display. "By the last picture," said Bill, "he's got open sores. And he's missing several fingers."

The average person, said Bill, was in far more danger, particularly in the 1920s, from the miracle cures displayed in the "Quacks" exhibit. Some, such as X-Ray Toothpaste, were simple frauds, but others, such as Revigator and Radithor, contained real radioactive water that occasionally killed the customers who drank it.

To qualify for the X-Ray Corps, soldiers had to be able to assemble their own equipment on the battlefield.

These somber exhibits, however, are a mere shadow on the generally upbeat image presented at the ASRT Museum. "Pioneering Sisters," for example, pays tribute to the Roman Catholic nuns who comprised more than a third of the radiologist workforce in the field's early years ("They tended to be smart people," Bill explained). A digital exhibit shows how radiologic imaging has revealed paintings hidden behind other, more famous artworks that were painted over them. "Canvas was expensive," said Bill, "so if artists didn't like their work, they'd wash off the paint and start again." The lead in the pigment remained in the canvas, leaving the earlier artworks' ghostly outlines behind.

Peek-a-boo! Early fluoroscopy with a handheld screen.

Interactive displays test visitors rad tech qualifications. "Beat the Clock" challenges them to assemble a portable x-ray unit from World War II in under eight minutes. "Gearing Up" encourages visitors to dress in replica antique x-ray protection hoods, aprons, and gloves ("The actual stuff is lead; a lot heavier," said Bill). "Assemble a Body" is an Operation-style digital game where visitors have to build a human skeleton out of mixed-up x-rays of various joints, bones, and appendages.

A two-volume 1940s edition of the Atlas of Roentgenographic Positions, on display in a showcase, would list nearly twice as many positions today, said Bill, "hundreds and hundreds, and a technologist has to know them all." This reinforces a point that the ASRT Museum makes frequently: medical radiation is now in the hands of people who've been thoroughly trained.

"You have to know a lot about anatomy, physiology, biology, psychology," said Bill. "You need to understand how dangerous this is. That's why technologists go to school. You don't want somebody who doesn't understand radiation taking your x-rays."