Henry Snowden Ward (1865–1911) Biography with special reference to X-rays in 1896

Abstract

Henry Snowden Ward 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 first published in May 1896 and went into three editions with the later editions, 1898 and 1901, expanded and co­-authored with Adolph Isenthal (d~1910), 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. As with most early demonstrators of X-rays imaging, Snowden Ward left the field once qualified physicians, surgeons, physicists and engineers became more involved and took over as the prime leaders in X-ray diagnosis and therapy. Snowden Ward went on to publish and lecture on Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare. He died suddenly in December 1911 in New York whilst on a Dickens & Shakespeare lecture tour of the USA. Some of the illustrations from the three editions of Practical Radiography are included.