How did X-Rays gain mass adoption?

Summary

At the University of Würzburg, Wilhelm Röntgen took the first X-Ray (XR) and presented his work “On a New Kind of Rays” in December 1985 which was printed in January 1986. In January 1986, it was reprinted in English in Nature, The Electrician, Lancet, and BMJ. A lot of literature was written about XR’s in the months to follow. News outlets from across the world picked up on this story writing that “a professor from Wurzburg had successfully used a new type of light to take a photograph of a set of weights without opening the wooden box in which the weights were kept” and able to "take a picture of the human hand showing the bones without the flesh”. Critics were loud. Otto Lummer, Rontgen’s colleague, said Rontgen had “otherwise always been a sensible fellow and it’s not carnival season yet”. For example, William Morton (US physician and professor of electrotherapeutics) published The X ray or Photography of the invisible and its value in surgery. Arthur Wright at Yale reproduced X-Rays in January of 1986, Francis William published the first clinical report (using some of Edison’s work), Rontgen published on better tube design and image quality, and Tesla made tweaks to the tube to improve performance. There were 49 monographs and 1044 research papers on XRs in 1896 alone. Physicians championed this. For example, William Stubenbord started using XR techniques in April of 1896 and presented to his local society in June. Representative comments include: At present we can detect deformities in bones and the bony pelvis; we can note the growth of bones and the malacosteon conditions important to the obstetrician; we can clearly see the shoulder-joint, the ribs, the vertebrae, the union of the pubes, the hip-joint and the curvatures of the spine. We can describe fractures of bones and readily distinguish them from dislocations, determine how to set them, and even watch their reunion without removing the splints and bandages. We can watch the absorption of a bone and rea...