Abstract
By the end of the 1920s, the wholesale commodification of x-rays and radium had made them ubiquitous. Nonscientist Americans could and did interact with them physically, intellectually, and rhetorically. Some were indifferent, and many had retained through those first few decades the vague dread or acute fear that had been part of the spectrum of reactions from the start. Those misgivings might be the result of specific fears having to do with the direct experience of irradiation itself. They might also be due to a wounded sense of Victorian propriety, a reaction against a new physics that seemed daily more metaphysical, or a manifestation of the broader antimodern sentiment that had not only Soddy in its sights but also Joyce, Stravinsky, and Picasso. For the most part, though, science and medicine were held in high regard, and by virtue of decades of popular science writing, x-rays and radioactivity were more than ever the emblems of those disciplines.
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Notes
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© 2013 Matthew Lavine
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Lavine, M. (2013). Backlash. In: The First Atomic Age. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137307224_4
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