Сhapters of photomedicine history: diagnostic transillumination technique in 1860-1880s

Abstract

In the first apparatus for diagnostic transillumination of human body tissues and organs a platinum wire or plate was used as a light source, which was white heated by the current from the accumulator battery and protected by a glass screen. Having a small outer diameter, such a device could be introduced into the internal body cavities via natural openings. In the second half of the 1860s - early 1870s in the Russian Empire a number of designs of this type was created, including improved, which had a water cooling and a more powerful electric arc lights. But then, without meeting practical support from doctors and manufacturers of medical equipment, the pioneers of diagnostic x-ray has reduced their activity in this direction.

The St. Petersburg physicist and electrical engineer D.A.Lachinov, returning to active work after a conflict with the law, was demonstrated his new model in 1873, at the IV Congress of Russian naturalists at Kazan. However, this time, Russian doctors did not heed his suggestions to test transilluminator on the sick people. So, D.A.Lachinov gradually moved away from the topic of medical use of the electric light, although continued to deal with related issues — the photometry; the photography of voltaic arc, of electric discharges in a gas atmosphere and in vacuum; the optimization of joint operation of different light sources. However, Lachinov went in the history of Russian science through the decision of other, more practically important questions in electrical engineering, through a large number of inventions, through the work as a patent expert.

Kharkov Professor I.P.Lazarevich continued to improve and apply invented them in 1868 transilluminator- diaphanoscope for the study of gynecologic patients in his clinic. His findings were not published in separate articles, but Lazarevich has included a brief description of his results and scheme of devices in two editions of his «Course of obstetrics», the first of which was published in 1877–1879 in Kharkov, and the second, revised and enlarged — in 1894 in St. Petersburg. He moved to the capital in 1886, and was used here as a light source the incandescent lamp of Edison with the vacuum bulb. I.P.Lazarevich used diaphanoscopy to study the structure of the human embryo, observing iterative process of ossification and development of vessels and organs in it.

Former Kiev doctor V.A.Milliot, who in the first time demonstrated in Paris his transilluminator in 1867 and then improved it for the diagnosis of diseases of the stomach and bladder, has not managed to organize clinical trials of these devices. Since 1870 Milliot moved to France. First,he contained private resort on the shore of the Mediterranean sea near Toulon, and from 1880 he worked as a colonial doctor of the coastal settlements in Algeria. V.A.Milliot continued to print the scientific works, but all of them relate to other topics. Only the opening V.K.Roentgen x-rays, which promised to realize the old dream of Milliot — «to make the human body is translucent, like the fingers of the hand posed to the candle», a pioneer of diagnostic transillumination responded by the article «Fotoorganoscopy», where he recalled his contribution to the subject — because the x-rays are also light but invisible.

The rapid development of x-ray fluoroscopy and radiography for a long time obscured the transillumination by visible light, more safe and (potentially) more informative method for diagnostics due to the richness of colors. Nevertheless, the experience of intra-cavitary electric transillumination served as a basis for the development of endoscopic devices with distal light sources.