Today, we kill ourselves to remove hair. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Years ago, I did a program on
the mania that followed
the discovery of X-rays in 1896 -- things like
commercial lead-lined undergarments to protect
women from prying rays. The craziness went so far
that someone opened a women's hair-removal clinic
soon after early X-ray technicians found they were
losing their hair.
At the time, that struck me as absurd. But now
historian Rebecca Herzig writes a history of
cosmetic hair removal by X-ray. It was, as it turns
out, serious business for about fifty years. It
began right after Roentgen's discovery, and it
continued through WW-II.
The dangers of X-rays were clear enough within a
few years, but they made hair removal just too
easy. One early practitioner, Albert Geyser,
created his Tricho machine. A woman would
sit for four minutes with her chin in a holder
while X-rays wove a delicate ozone smell about her.
The hair on her chin was gone. Only later did she
have to pay the terrible price. By 1970, one third
of all radiation-induced cancer in women traced to
X-ray hair-removal. In 1954, a Tricho patient wrote
to a doctor,
... within the last few years 'white spots' have
appeared on my chin. This has been ...
heartbreaking to me ... I have been wondering if
there might possibly be some new medical discovery
which might help me.
The practice had been not just dangerous but often
illegal as well, for decades. Herzig begins her
story by telling how San Francisco police staked
out a house in 1940. Women entered by the front
door and left by the back. A doctor with a black
bag came and went. They thought it was an illegal
abortion mill. It turned out to be a secret X-ray
hair-removal clinic.
Herzig
thinks that X-rays came along when the time was
ripe. Darwin's ideas were on everyone's mind, and
that fed a whole new hair-consciousness. Hair was
what apes had, not humans. Suddenly, hair anywhere
but on a woman's head was viewed as a medical
disablilty. Yet the acceptable means of removal
were all nasty. Hot wax and electrolysis were
expensive and painful, and using a razor blade
meant directly acknowledging the problem. But
X-rays were painless, permanent -- and
scientific. Like tobacco, they harbored a
danger that lay beyond the near horizon. So
countless women secretly used X-rays.
Two Canadian doctors finally gave a name to all the
scarring, ulceration, cancer, and death that X-rays
had caused. They called it the North American
Hiroshima maiden syndrome. X-ray hair removal
finally ended after 1946 -- after we'd seen all
those terribly wounded Japanese women whose
radiation hair-removal had been no matter of
choice.
But once we had
acknowledged the threat, that did not mean we had
learned to accept our true human nature. Perhaps
some other time I should do a program about the
excesses that men have gone to, trying to
get hair back onto their balding heads.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
