Who Accidentally Discovered Radiotherapy’s Therapeutic Use?
For over a century, people have gone to radiotherapy centres with the knowledge that they can receive some of the best treatment possible to help remove growths and lesions, treat nerve conditions with the accuracy of a scalpel and provide intensive, effective treatment to battle cancer.
Long before this, radiation has been used to help treat various conditions with varying degrees of success, but one of the biggest breakthroughs and explorations of the effects of radiation on the body that has made over a decade of treatments possible might have come as the result of an accident.
Whilst serendipity is a typical part of scientific discovery, it does not often come from forgetfulness, particularly regarding a material that needs to be handled with utmost care.
A Pocket Full Of Radium
In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray, and within a year several doctors were using it to try and treat cancer without really knowing how it worked.
The same year that Emil Grubbe was trying to treat breast cancer patients with X-rays, Henri Becquerel was studying the nature of radioactivity and where X-rays actually came from.
His work on Uranium would ultimately inspire significant research into radioactivity and radiation, including by Mr Becquerel’s later research partners Marie and Pierre Curie.
Their discoveries would ultimately win the trio a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, but two years before this, Henri Becquerel would make his biggest contribution to the medical world, and it was the result of a typical bout of forgetfulness.
Whilst X-rays had been used successfully to treat skin cancers and bouts of lupus, there was no consensus as to why they were effective. Nikola Tesla believed it was a result of ozone, something thoroughly debunked within a year, as was a competing theory that suggested it was electrical discharge.
Radiation sensation
The first attempted cancer treatment using radiation by Victor Despeignes was largely based on an educated guess that turned out to be wrong.
Radiation has a bactericidal effect, and Mr Despeignes believed, wrongly, that cancer was a parasitic growth. However, whilst his conclusion was wrong, his choice of treatment was the right one, even if it ultimately came too late to save his patient.
In 1900, Robert Kienbock determined that the X-rays themselves were the cause of the therapeutic effect, and Otto Walkhoff noticed a very similar effect with radium.
However, Henri Becquerel ultimately became the one to prove this through the absent-minded storage of a sample of radium salts.
He slotted it in a chest pocket on his waistcoat for several hours whilst he worked, thinking nothing of it at the time. However, within a couple of weeks, the skin had developed a particularly severe case of burning and inflammation.
This led him to visit Ernest Besnier of the St Louis Hospital in Paris in 1901. He took a lot at the burn and concluded that he believed it was caused by the radium itself.
The Becquerel burn
The “Becquerel burn”, as it became known, led to another wave of developments in radiation therapy once Marie Curie confirmed the physiological effects on radium.
Once that was confirmed, it started to be used in the same way as X-rays but could be far more versatile in an era before radiation beams, as it could be applied in a range of different ways compared to X-rays.
Radium was not used very often because it was somewhat difficult to acquire until pitchblende extraction techniques were refined, allowing it to be used far more widely, and for decades become one of the most important front-line treatments for cancer.
Unfortunately, whilst he received multiple accolades and looked to have an exceptionally lengthy scientific career ahead of him as the chairman of the Academy of Sciences, his career was tragically cut short as just months after his appointment on 25th August 1908, he died of a cardiac arrest.
It was reported that he also had serious skin burns, which were the results of not carefully handling radioactive materials and wearing protective equipment, providing not only scientific advancement but also an illustration of why they are handled with so much care.
At the age of just 55, he would be the second of the Nobel Prize-winning trio to die after Pierre Curie was tragically killed by a heavy horse cart and unfortunately did not get to see the lasting legacy of his discoveries in the field of medicine.
Much like the Curies, he is immortalised as one of the standard units for radioactivity is named the becquerel, but one of his most pivotal acts was to forget to put radium away properly.