<P> Röntgen discovered their medical use when he made a picture of his wife's hand on a photographic plate formed due to X-rays . The photograph of his wife's hand was the first photograph of a human body part using X-rays . When she saw the picture, she said "I have seen my death ." </P> <P> In 1895, Thomas Edison investigated materials' ability to fluoresce when exposed to X-rays, and found that calcium tungstate was the most effective substance . Around March 1896, the fluoroscope he developed became the standard for medical X-ray examinations . Nevertheless, Edison dropped X-ray research around 1903, even before the death of Clarence Madison Dally, one of his glassblowers . Dally had a habit of testing X-ray tubes on his hands, and acquired a cancer in them so tenacious that both arms were amputated in a futile attempt to save his life . </P> <P> The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall - Edwards in Birmingham, England on 11 January 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate . On 14 February 1896 Hall - Edwards was also the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation . In early 1896, several weeks after Röntgen's discovery, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that the rays "not only photograph, but also affect the living function". </P> <P> The first medical X-ray made in the United States was obtained using a discharge tube of Pulyui's design . In January 1896, on reading of Röntgen's discovery, Frank Austin of Dartmouth College tested all of the discharge tubes in the physics laboratory and found that only the Pulyui tube produced X-rays . This was a result of Pulyui's inclusion of an oblique "target" of mica, used for holding samples of fluorescent material, within the tube . On 3 February 1896 Gilman Frost, professor of medicine at the college, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy, whom Gilman had treated some weeks earlier for a fracture, to the X-rays and collected the resulting image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates obtained from Howard Langill, a local photographer also interested in Röntgen's work . </P>

When was the x ray first used in medicine