Celebrating 50 years of the first human CT scan: The untold South African connection

Abstract

INTRODUCTION October 1, 2021, marked the 50th anniversary of the very first computed tomography (CT) scan of a patient. The scan was performed at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital in Wimbledon, London, revealing for the very first time a direct live image of the human brain. The unfortunate patient, a 41-year-old woman, harbored a brain tumor which the scan, although grainy, clearly and unequivocally revealed.(1) (Fig. 1) This image has come to capture imagination in much the same way as that of Mrs. Röntgen’s hand in 1895. Unlike the controversy surrounding the invention of the MRI,(2) Godfrey Hounsfield is the indisputable inventor of the clinical CT scan. Nevertheless, two South Africans who both completed their undergraduate degrees in South Africa, made seminal and original contributions toward the foundational theory and clinical development of the CT scan. This South African contribution is today, 50 years on, rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated, by even South Africans themselves: in a widely circulated South African online article commemorating the 50th anniversary of the CT scan, no mention was made of the South African connection.(3) This brief vignette aims to tell the story of the CT scan and the South Africans central to its development, which came to completely revolutionise the practice of neurology and neurosurgery and, shortly thereafter, of medicine itself.