In 1920, “cutting-edge cancer treatment” looked very different from what we know today. A woman lay on a hospital bed, her legs suspended in fabric slings—not for comfort, but for access. Electrical wires hung overhead. There were no imaging screens, no digital dosimetry, only a raw beam of radiation crudely aimed at a disease doctors barely understood. She was suffering from advanced cervical cancer, and by spring her case was considered hopeless. In desperation, physicians tried something radical: intra-vaginal X-ray therapy. Radiation was directed straight into the vagina, aimed at the cervix, in repeated treatments that lasted nearly two hours at a time. The doctors documented every detail—the position of her legs, the distance from the radiation source, the amperage of the tube—because this was all being invented in real time. And then something unexpected happened. The tumor began to shrink. Malignant cells responded rapidly. Her weight returned, her blood work normalized, and she reported a sense of well-being she hadn’t felt in months. But the treatment came at a cost. She experienced intense nausea, what physicians then called “X-ray sickness.” This was the price of hope in an era before safety standards, before shielding, before medicine truly understood what radiation did to the body. The image of her treatment wasn’t taken to shock—it was taken to teach. The process was published so other doctors could learn how to position the patient, manage the wires, and aim the rays. It represents a moment when medicine stood on the edge of discovery and danger, crude, messy, and profoundly human. Every modern radiation oncology suite traces its lineage back to scenes like this.