Departmental Colloquium -X-ray Photography from Würzburg to Kingston: Two Months of Physics Invention and Social Media in 1896

Date

Friday January 9, 2026
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

STI A
Event Category

John Schreiner, PhD, FCCPM, FCOMP, FAAPM                                                                       
Past President, Medical Physics for World Benefit
Former Chief Medical Physicist, CCSEO at KHSC,
Emeritus Professor, Oncology and Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy,  Queen’s University      

 

Abstract

Last November was the 130th anniversary of the discovery of x rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895. In the next months, the news of his discovery hit world attention. And less than two months after he produced what is considered the first anatomical x‑ray photograph of his wife’s hand, that experiment was reproduced in Canada on February 7th at McGill, and on the 17th in Kingston by a physicist from RMC.
 
In this talk I will present how the news of the discovery travelled via that era’s version of social media, and how the stage was set for Kingston’s and Canada’s  x‑ray legacy.
 
BIO:
L. John Schreiner retired as Chief of Medical Physics at the Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario in 2019, and is now Professor Emeritus of Oncology and Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. He obtained his PhD investigating NMR relaxation in tissue model systems (Waterloo, 1985) and then joined McGill’s Medical Physics Unit where he initiated research in 3D dosimetry for radiation therapy quality assurance that spanned the rest of his career. His research extended to advancing Cobalt-60 teletherapy and investigating in-house end-to-end QA programs to ensure safe implementation and maintenance of clinical radiation therapy.
 
He has served the medical physics community as the Canadian Medical Physics newsletter editor, member of numerous Canadian Organization of Medical Physicsts (COMP) committees, and as Canadian College of  Physicists in Medicine board member and President. He was a founder and organizer for 14 Internation Conferences on Three Dimensional Dosimetry (IC3Ddose) meetings. He just stepped down as Past President of Medical Physics for World Benefit (MPWB) and will be editor of their newsletter.  He has supervised over 120 trainees ( including 27MSc, 8PhD) introducing them to radiation therapy medical physics. And they enabled John to publish in ~120 peer reviewed publications. He has been invested as a Fellow of both COMP and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).
 

 

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium.

 

 

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