Category: Imaging Panics

• The X-Ray "Thought Reading"

  This theory claimed that X-rays could do more than reveal bones or hidden objects inside the body: they could expose a person’s thoughts, moral character, spiritual condition, or hidden sins. It emerged almost immediately after the public announcement of X-rays in 1895–1896, when the new technology inspired both scientific excitement and broad speculation about invisible revelation. Privacy panic, spirit-photography traditions, and late Victorian interest in photographing the invisible all helped turn radiography into a tool of imagined moral and mental exposure.