31/01/2026
After last week Cervical Screening chat, it could be a lot worse ladies!! 😬
In the early 1900’s, this was what “cutting-edge cancer treatment” looked like.
A woman lies on a hospital bed, her legs suspended in fabric slings, held aloft not for comfort, but for access.
Electrical wires hang overhead. There are no imaging screens. No digital dosimetry. Just a raw beam of radiation crudely aimed at a disease doctors barely understood.
The patient had advanced cervical cancer. By spring, her case was considered hopeless. At the time this was a sentence to a slow and painful death.
So physicians tried something radical: intra-va**nal X-ray therapy. Radiation was directed straight into the va**na, aimed at the cervix, in repeated treatments lasting nearly two hours at a time.
The doctors carefully noted the position of her legs, the distance from the radiation source, the amperage of the tube because this was all being invented in real time.
And then…something unexpected happened.
The tumor began to shrink. Malignant cells responded rapidly. Her weight returned. Her blood work normalized. She reported a sense of well-being she hadn’t felt in months.
She also experienced intense nausea. What at the time they called “X-ray sickness.” The cost of hope, in an era before safety standards, before shielding, before we truly understood what radiation did to the body.
The process was published so other doctors could learn how to position the patient, how to manage the wires, how to aim the rays. It represents a moment when medicine stood on the edge of discovery and danger, crude, messy, and human.
Every modern radiation oncology suite traces its lineage back to scenes like this.
