X-RAYS MARTYR.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 6 March 1925, Page 2

X-RAYS MARTYR.

SURGEON’S SACRIFICE

30 years: RESEARCH

.One of the most famous pioneers in X-rays research and a martyr to this science for the relief of human suffering, Major J. Hall-Edwards, is lying dangerously ill at his home in Edgbaston, Birmingham, says the Daily Mirror.

X-ravs were discovered about thirty years ago. Major Hall,-Edwards began experimenting with them a year later, before their .devastating powers were fully known. In his self-sacrificing work he has endured untold agonies. His left hand and forearm and four fingers of his right hand had to be amputated as a result of the dread disease —-dermatitis —which he contracted within a few months of beginning his night-and-day investigations. Despite the terrible price he has paid, Major Hall-Edwards never complained,; his fortitude was wonderful —and he went on with the self-imposed task for which his skill as a surgeon qualified him.

It was Major Hall-Edwards who took the Rontgen . ray photograph of the first case in which an operation was made possible bv that means. He went to South Africa as radiographer during the Boer War and did valuable work.

For twenty years he was senior medical officer of the X-rays department of the General Hospital at Birmingham, and during the Great War he was in charge of four extensive radiographic departments of military hospitals in the city. • In recognition of his services to the nation he was granted d Civil List pension of £l2O a year in 1908. Three years ago this month that was supplemented by an annuity of £IOO and the medallion of the Carnegie Heroes Fund.

Although with only his right thumb left in place of a pair of hands, he had affixed an apparatus whereby be could hold a cigarette and a spoon or fork -to feed ■himself.

NO REGRETS

More extraordinary than that, he painted ■Dictures which in the summer of last vear were included in a private exhibition of the Royal School of Medicine. , As a hoy. he was ambitious to become an artist, but lie entered the medical nrofession instead, and, except for a few sketches during the South African war, never touched a brush again until. i year or two ago. “I do not regret my experience the slightest bit.” said Major Hall-Edwards some years ago. “Though I have suffered considerably, I have had the pleasure of saving the lives of others.” It was recently that- the death w;as reported at Bordeaux of Professor Bergonie, helplessly crippled after months of suffering from the ravages of X-rays, with which lie had experimented in tlie campaign against cancer. .Professor Bergonie was recently awarded the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour.