Abstract
The SWH funded two X-ray vans during the war, X-ray equipment mounted in an ambulance to allow it to be operated remotely. The first SWH van was one of the earliest British vans. Florence inspected it for the War Office in July 1915 before it was shipped to Royaumont Abbey, France. Advice on its design had come from Marie Curie and Hertha Ayrton. The X-ray equipment was operated in a tent, and the van was used as a darkroom. This van was used to support other smaller hospitals. The second SWH X-ray van, named after Edith Cavell, was assembled in Glasgow in the summer of 1916 and was delivered to Salonika in 1917. Edith was deeply critical of its design and judged it to be of little or no operational value. Particularly, it was too small and low slung to operate over rough mountain roads in Serbia where it was needed, it was underpowered, and it was only suitable for fluoroscopy. By the end of the war, the War Office had deployed 14 vans, including a rugged design in which power could be drawn from batteries or a dynamo, and the van included space for both X-ray examination and darkroom.
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Notes
- 1.
The War Office X-ray Committee was formally set up in late 1915 with responsibility for the planning, equipping and organising of X-ray services at home and on the battlefield, although it operated informally before that.
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Thomas, A., Duck, F. (2019). Mobile Radiography. In: Edith and Florence Stoney, Sisters in Radiology. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16561-1_13
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