Henry Snowden Ward (1865–1911), photographer & author of the first X-ray textbook: Practical Radiography (May 1896)

Abstract

This article is a biography of H. Snowden Ward, who was a professional photographer, Editor of “The Photogram”
magazine, itinerant lecturer in England in 1896 on X-rays, and the author of the world’s first textbook on X-rays “Practical
Radiography” which was published in May 1896 and went into three editions with the later editions, 1898 and
1901, expanded and co-authored with Adolph Isenthal, a manufacturer in London of electrical apparatus and X-ray
apparatus. Ward was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and a founding member of the Röntgen Society.
The descriptions and press opinions of his lecture on the “New Light & New Photography” are perhaps unique, but
they are valuable in that they transport us back in time to the very early days of X-rays before medical men took over
responsibility for X-ray applications, and the field was organised by photographers and some physicists and electrical
engineers. The article concludes with a selected bibliography of Snowden Ward’s books. These include publications
about Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare.