The X-Ray Department of the Queen's Hospital in Sidcup, c.1918. From the Antony Wallace Archive of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS)

This issue's cover image shows the X-ray department of the Queen's Hospital at Frognal House in Sidcup, Britain's first purpose-built plastic surgery institution. The photograph features two men posed with the hospital's X-ray equipment and a patient prepared for a radiographic analysis. Radiographs played a crucial role in diagnosis and planning of treatment for the facial injury patients at Sidcup. Harold Gillies (1882-1960) used a number of the radiographic images produced by the department to illustrate the cases in his monumental 1920 work Plastic surgery of the face. The figure in the foreground wearing an officer's uniform is possibly Captain Henry Mulrea Johnston, the surgeon who Gillies thanked in the preface to the volume for his ingenuity in adapting existing technology to jaw injuries. The man in the background is an unnamed technician.

Although X-rays, or Röntgen rays, had only been discovered in 1895, by the First World War radiographic technology was already widely used in medicine. Five mobile X-ray units were available at the Front, in addition to many of the casualty clearing stations and base hospitals. The bulky equipment used on the Front was not particularly well suited to imaging dental injuries. In this photograph the X-ray unit has been adapted for jaw injuries by Mulrea Johnston. The patient is shown with the head angled to take an oblique lateral view of the jaw. The men in the photograph are wearing protective aprons as the dangers of X-rays were increasingly recognised during the war years. In 1915, the British Röntgen Society introduced its first code of practice to counter the harmful effects of X-rays by recommending screens, gloves and aprons for operators.

With thanks to Kristin Hussey, Assistant Curator, Hunterian Museum.