The video of the complete lecture is now available on Youtube. Click here to watch.

Missing the Gorilla 

Following on from the popular Christmas presentation by Professor Wolfe, the BSNR would like to invite you to attend a follow-up Easter Lecture on line at 6 pm on Wednesday 21^st April.

“Missing the Gorilla: Radiology, Inattentional Blindness and the Law”  is to be given by the nationally renowned Paul Sankey, one of the country’s leading Clinical Negligence solicitors and a particular expert on how the law views ‘errors’ in radiology. So whereas Professor Wolfe talked about why radiologists miss things on scans, Paul will be talking about what happens when radiologists miss things on scans.

More details and registration for this free event are on the BNSR website

Report on the British Society for the History of Radiology Annual lecture 2021

By Dr Arpan K Banerjee Past Chair and current trustee BSHR

Due to the current Covid pandemic this year’s annual lecture was delivered as a virtual event on Monday 8 Feb 2021. Dr Uwe Busch a distinguished radiology historian , author and the current director of the Rontgen Museum in Remscheid – Lennep , Germany delivered a talk entitled ‘New results on biographical research on W C Rontgen’ .

The first half of the talk was devoted to the Rontgen family tree and we learnt about his ancestors who were successful cloth merchants. Lennep was a small town whose history goes back to the 12 th century and many were farmers in this Bergishland region and then worked in the cloth trade before industrialisation occurred. We were given a detailed review of Rontgen’s lineage. Rontgen was born in the house bought by his grandfather which today has been preserved for posterity.

In the second half of the talk research from Rontgen’s estate and collections in the Rontgen museum were presented. Rontgen left behind over 1800 letters and documents as well as around 2000 glass plates. Of particular interest was his first paper on X-Rays and the people he sent this paper to which included the great and the good of the physicists of his era. In the UK, Arthur Schuster from Manchester and Lord Rayleigh and J J Thompson ( discoverer of the electron ) at Cambridge and Lord Kelvin in Glasgow were all on his list of recipients.

This section of the talk also covered his marriage to Bertha and included illustrations from Rontgen’s extensive photograph collection. Photography was a major hobby of Rontgen’s and the pictures of old Wurzburg which were shown to the audience were a wonderful evocation of what the place was like in his era.

The lecture was well received by the virtual on line audience and Dr Busch was thanked for his wonderful, scholarly informative presentation.

Check the TALKS tab for reports of previous lectures