Evolution of Physics in Medical Technology

A twelve-row table, printed across two pages and explicitly marked 'Not for examination', pairs a landmark physics discovery with the medical imaging or therapy technique it went on to enable. It starts with Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen's 1895 discovery of X-rays, which directly gave radiology X-ray imaging. Next, the 1896-1898 work on the theory of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie and Marie Curie enabled radioisotope imaging and nuclear medicine. Joliot and Irene Curie's 1934 discovery of artificial radioactivity enabled scintigraphy. Around 1950, the physics behind ultrasound enabled echography and sonography. Cormack and Hounsfield's X-ray computed tomography work, recognised in 1979, gave computed tomography (CT) scanning. Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell's nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) work, recognised in 1952, enabled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) -- and it is worth noting that 1979 and 1952 are the actual Nobel Prize years for the CT and NMR work respectively, so the table's 'Year' column is tracking scientific recognition, not just the original discovery date. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) appears as a later row, though the exact year and inventor credited to it are not reliably legible in the extracted source and are not guessed here. The 1940s development of the optical fibre enabled endoscopy and biomedical sensors. The 1960 invention of the LASER gave medicine a surgical instrument and diagnostic tool. The 1959 conceptual origin of nanotechnology -- the same year as this unit's own opening Feynman epigraph -- eventually enabled nanomedicine and targeted drug delivery. A 2005 row records the arrival of Dua …