Sunday is the International Day of Radiology, the anniversary of the Friday afternoon in 1895 when Wilhelm Röntgen noticed a screen glowing where it had no business glowing. Dawson Briggs Wilder on the discovery that built a specialty, and the catheter that turned it into a cure.
Written: Dawson Briggs Wilder
Medical/Wellness Journalist for VBNRADIO
On the late afternoon of November 8, 1895, a physics professor at the University of Würzburg was fiddling with a cathode-ray tube in a darkened lab when a fluorescent screen across the room lit up. The tube was covered. The screen should have stayed dark. Wilhelm Röntgen spent the next several weeks working out what kind of ray could pass through cardboard, wood and, as it turned out, people.
About six weeks after that first glow, he made an image of his wife's hand. Anna Bertha Röntgen looked at the bones and the ring and reportedly said, "I have seen my death!" It remains the most honest patient feedback in the history of imaging.
Röntgen was handed the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. He declined to give the Nobel lecture, being shy in front of crowds, and he refused to patent the discovery because he wanted the whole world to use it. The whole world took him up on it.
Why Sunday matters
The International Day of Radiology falls on November 8 for that reason. It is a joint project of the European Society of Radiology, the Radiological Society of North America and the American College of Radiology, and 2026 marks its fifteenth edition. This year's spotlight is emergency radiology, which is apt: no modern emergency department functions for more than about forty minutes without a scanner.
In the United States, the week around November 8 is also National Radiologic Technology Week, established by the American Society of Radiologic Technologists. Fun fact for the break room: the first one was held in July 1979 and was later moved to November to line up with Röntgen's discovery. So if your tech asks you to hold your breath this week, hold it with a little reverence.
The day radiology stopped just looking
For roughly seventy years, radiology was a spectator sport. You took the picture, you described the problem, and you handed it to a surgeon. Then came January 16, 1964, in Portland, Oregon.
Charles Dotter, who chaired diagnostic radiology at what is now Oregon Health & Science University from 1952 until his death in 1985, had a patient: an 82-year-old woman with a painfully narrowed superficial femoral artery, a gangrenous foot and a firm refusal to have her leg amputated. Dotter threaded a guidewire through the blockage and followed it with a series of coaxial Teflon catheters, each a little wider than the last, and pushed the artery open from the inside.
Blood flow returned. The artery stayed open until she died of pneumonia about two and a half years later, leg attached. Dotter and his trainee Melvin Judkins published the technique in Circulation that November.
That procedure is why Dotter is commonly called the father of interventional radiology, and it is why this site treats IR as a priority rather than a footnote. He went on to invent the catheter-delivered stent and, in 1973, performed the first transjugular liver biopsy in a human. A specialty that had spent seven decades pointing at problems had learned to fix them through a hole the width of a pencil lead.
Opinion: the quiet ones in the dark
Here is where Dawson editorializes. Radiology has an image problem, which is ironic. The public pictures a radiologist as a person in a dark room muttering at a screen, if it pictures one at all. The interventional radiologist, who can stop a bleed, drain an abscess, open an artery or starve a tumor without a scalpel, is almost invisible outside the hospital.
Part of that is the specialty's own fault. Surgeons have TV shows. Radiologists have reading rooms. Nobody has written a drama about a woman who kept her leg because a physicist in Würzburg once refused to go home early.
So this Sunday, if you have ever had a CT that found the thing in time, or a stent that let you keep walking, raise a cup of break-room coffee to Röntgen, to Dotter, and to the technologist who told you to hold still. They see right through you, and that is the point.
References
International Day of Radiology, "About IDoR" and 2026 homepage, European Society of Radiology. https://www.internationaldayofradiology.com/about-idor/
Wikipedia, "Wilhelm Röntgen" (discovery date, Anna Bertha's hand, 1901 Nobel Prize, refusal to patent). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen
Wikipedia, "Charles Dotter" (January 16, 1964 angioplasty; Circulation 1964 with Melvin Judkins; OHSU chairmanship; transjugular liver biopsy). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dotter
Wikipedia, "National Radiologic Technology Week" (ASRT; first held July 1979, moved to November). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Radiologic_Technology_Week
