Beauty's Bones

At the Century of Progress exhibit of the Chicago Roentgen Ray Society, Dr. Hollis Elmer Potter, Chicago x-ray specialist, last week hung the first full-length, full-size, one-piece x-ray photograph of the complete human body ever put on display (see cut). X-ray technicians heretofore have made composite pictures of the whole body. The Chicago exhibit was the result of a single, one-second exposure to x-rays.

The model for the Chicago picture is a pretty Rochester, N. Y. girl who occasionally poses for Eastman Kodak advertisements. She is 20, weighs 115 lb., wears a size 13 dress, a size 21 hat. She has soft brown eyes, a cupid-bow mouth, wavy, bobbed, brown hair. Her arms, legs, hands and feet are all long for her height. She posed behind a thin metal screen which was cut out in the centre so as to expose her torso and head to the full rays of a regular x-ray machine. By means of the screen and cut-out a more penetrating photographic exposure was given to the thick part of her body than to its less dense extremities.

When Arthur W. Fuchs, Eastman's x-ray expert, took the picture, the girl was wearing a white cotton dress. Visible were her jewelry: a necklace and pendant of gold and jade, a white-gold wrist watch, a silver bracelet, two rings, an earring.

When Mr. Fuchs developed the x-ray film he discovered that his model held her bobbed hair in place with metal hairpins, her stockings with metal clasps. Her skeleton is boyish-broad shoulders, narrow hips, big lungs and heart. Her only trouble, and that not yet serious, appears to be a sagging colon.

Horizontal shading on the upper sections of the girl's thighs might be mistaken for the shadow cast by short panties made of leaded silk. But Photographer Fuchs, a shy, domesticated gentleman, is certain that the lines are the edges of his cut-out screen which did not even up the two degrees of exposure perfectly.

Eastman Kodak, which has not yet determined the selling price of the 32x72 in. films necessary for such a full-length radiograph, claims that it will be useful for taking a picture of all the broken and dislocated bones of an accident victim with a minimum of discomfort. Such pictures might also show all secondary cancers in an individual and the full extent of rickets. Students of anatomy and physiology could use such complete radiographs to study the varying relations of bones and organs to posture.

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