Wants: to peer into your empty skeleton
A fortnightly meditation on something for sale
A collection of three early X-ray photographs by Eugène Ducretet and unidentified photographers (1897–1902), available from Chiswick Auctions (est. £600 - £800)
In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), Hans Castorp contemplates his X-ray: “The flesh in which he walked disintegrated, annihilated, dissolved in vacant mist, and there within it was the finely turned skeleton of his own hand.” By the ray’s pervading power, Castorp sees what he thought he never could, “looking into his own grave”.
The X-ray was discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen at this “thin” time of year, on 8th November 1895. Whilst experimenting with cathode rays – streams of electrons in glass vacuum (or ‘Crookes’) tubes – Röntgen noticed a nearby experimental screen beginning to fluoresce, glowing green. Something was passing out of the tubes, through the cardboard he had wrapped them in, via the clutter on his desk, and hitting the screen across from him. Thus, the X-ray – “X” for the unknown – came to be wielded by people. When Röntgen used the technology to produce an image of the bones in his wife Anna Bertha’s hands, her verdict was immediate: “I have seen my death.”
This group of X-ray images, available through Chiswick Auctions, belong to the first years after Röntgen’s discovery. The earliest – a picture of a hand – dates from 1897; it was created by Eugène Ducretet, a fascinating fin de siècle technologist-impresario, whose workshop (half-salon, half-laboratory), produced much of the equipment that facilitated a revolution in electronics in turn of the century France. Ducretet specialised in Crookes tubes, in which the essential cathode rays flickered, and Ruhmkorff coils, the transformers that drove those tubes: both indispensable pieces for early radiographers. As French experimenters scrambled to produce the same spectres as Röntgen, the matériel was nearly always ‘appareils Ducretet’. In this sense, Ducretet was integral infrastructure in the revelation.
In 2025, the X-ray image remains a confounding one. When we regard the curving tube shapes of our own bones, our method for seeing wavers. What should really be the scientific gaze par excellence – a rational, enlightened, precise form of sight – is overlaid by the long human history of depicting skeletons; a group of images to which we all contribute when we are “X-rayed”. What stops us is not just the shock of witnessing our components but also the puzzles they imply. When Castorp is subjected to the Sanatorium’s X-rays in Mann’s Mountain, they exist in an uneasy economy of both “positive knowledge” and the sublime and superstitious experiences they provoke. The X-ray reveals knowledge, it implies modernity; but it also sharpens the lurking mystery – the heart, “alone with its question and its riddle”.
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This suite of X-ray images is part of the forthcoming Fine Photographs auction at Chiswick Auctions, beginning 27 November.