Computed tomography, or CT scanning, is one of the most powerful diagnostic tools to emerge during my medical career. Just look at the detail in the brain images above, taken at 90-degree angles through the brain. And I was there at the beginning. I remember well when I was a medical student taking neurology, and the first CT scanner arrived at the Mayo Clinic. By today’s standards, it was incredibly crude. It displayed a tiny image on a cathode ray tube that was then photographed with a Polaroid camera. Preservative lacquer was then smeared on the photograph and it was pasted into the patient’s chart with glue. But the crude photographs were amazingly superior to what physicians had previously, which was nothing. They had skull x-rays to look at the bone and the very painful and very indirect imaging technique called pneumoencephalography. So neurologists and neurosurgeons were ecstatic at the new technology because it allowed them to see the brain directly.
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