Priority for Radium Therapy of Benign Conditions and Cancer

In medicine, assigning priorities for original ideas and for first implementation of a new type of treatment or technology—radium afterloading, for example—is often difficult. This situation is certainly true for radium therapy, with conflicting claims coming from France, Germany, and the United States about who first implemented it. Moreover, if possible, a distinction must be made between the person who had the idea for a therapy and the person who actually implemented it. These people are not always one and the same. Difficulties in assigning priority also sometimes arise from the lack of a published claim in a medical journal, and extant photographic evidence is typically almost impossible to find some 100 years after the event. The present article tries to solve the problems of priority regarding those who were really responsible for the ideas and implementation of radium therapy, including the technique of afterloading.