Historical background of the use of radioactive iodine in medicine.

THE expansion of research on the thyroid gland that the past eighteen years have witnessed resulted from the meeting of two quite distinct lines of inquiry and discovery. The more ancient of these is that which through the centuries has identified the element iodine ever more closely with the thyroid gland, and the other, man's discovery that certain elements give off, or can be caused to give off, certain types of radiation. When these lines met, a new era opened in the progress of the understanding of the physiology and biochemistry of the thyroid gland and its diseases. The thyroid-iodine . . .