Life / Medicine

Radiotherapy

X-rays were first aimed at a tumour in January 1896 and skin cancers were cured in Stockholm by 1900; radium and divided doses then made radiotherapy a main cancer treatment.

Emil Grubbe in Chicago is said to have treated a breast cancer on 29 January 1896, weeks after Roentgen's announcement, and the Stockholm physicians Stenbeck and Sjögren cured skin cancers by 1900. Radium, discovered by Marie Curie in 1898, was soon applied to skin cancer. In the 1920s Claude Regaud and Henri Coutard in Paris showed that many small doses over weeks cure more cancer with less damage to healthy tissue, and medical linear accelerators (first at London's Hammersmith Hospital in 1953) later replaced X-ray tubes and cobalt units. About half of the 1.2 million invasive cancers diagnosed in the US in 2022 were treated with radiation.