Scalpel or rays? Radiotherapy and the struggle for the cancer patient in pre-second world war Germany.

Cancer treatment generally comes in four modalities.' Traditionally, surgery of tumours was the most important, while radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy were introduced as new forms of treatment in the course of the twentieth century. Although chemotherapy and immunotherapy did not become standard until after the Second World War, X-rays and radium were used as alternatives to the surgical knife in eliminating cancer cells soon after their discovery at the end of the nineteenth century.2 This essay is concerned with the way in which radiotherapy for the treatment of cancer took shape, especially in Germany, in the first decades of the twentieth century. The analysis concentrates on two aspects.