April 10, 1897. Yesterday afternoon, at Madame de Loynes’s house, experiments with Roentgen rays. Roentgen rays, a child’s toy. They remind me of my chemistry teacher Tatisbonne’s experiments. They are far less beautiful than a sunbeam. Behind the screen, the professor keeps saying, “I have made this discovery,” while he passes through boxes, hands, stuffed animals, a live puppy, a man’s head and chest. What shows up best are the buttons on the sleeves.
They photograph Sarah Bernhardt’s hand bones. She remains on her knees for five minutes without moving, always putting on the airs of a great artist.
I would rather be sentenced to spend the rest of my life reading verse than attend this skeleton puppet show two or three more times.
These Roentgen rays are X-rays, and Roentgen was the German physicist who discovered them and brought them to public attention. Four years after the gathering described in the text, Roentgen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery. He must have been an unusual and, at the very least, modest man, since he donated the prize money to his university and refused to have X-rays named after him. At such demonstrations, the harmful effects of exposure to this high-energy radiation were still unknown. We do not know whether poor Sarah Bernhardt suffered any lasting effects from those five minutes, but the hypothesis that Roentgen’s wife, who served as the model for many of these images, died as a result of such exposure has been suggested. The image of her hand bearing her wedding ring is famous for being the first X-ray photograph in history.
Although X-rays did not ultimately bear his name, there was a unit of radiation called the roentgen, which has since fallen into disuse.
Another scientist mentioned in this diary is Louis Pasteur, seeking funding to establish his institute, but that is another story.
