the term "health physics" -Reply

[FRAMEP@ORAU.GOV]

>Well, as long as it's friday, and there are folks in a storytelling
>mood out there, would someone care to explain how the term "health
>physics" came about?  Thanks!

Melissa, since you asked:

It arose in 1942 at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan
Project in the program they code named the Metallurgical Laboratory.
There is no definitive answer to your question, but most everyone
agrees that the term "health physics" served security interests
because it revealed nothing i.e. it didn't refer to
radioactivity/radiation. Nevertheless, the radiation survey
instruments built there had a Metallurgical Laboratory label on them.
Go figure. The radiation protection program was a part of the "Health
Division" which involved all sorts of medically related sections. 
The head guy of the Health Division, picked by Compton, was Robert
Stone from my alma mater, the University of Toronto. The "Health
Physics" section was formed within the Health Division, hence the
"Health". Since the radiation protection work primarily involved
physics-type activities, and since many of these guys were
physicists, the term "physics" was added. This is speculation and
came from Barton Hacker's "The Dragons Tail". 

The head of the Health Physics group was a physicist who had worked
with Compton: Ernest O. Wollan - the first to use the title "Health
Physicist". He died some 10 years ago. In the period 1945 to 1950,
Wollan and Clifford Shull developed the technique of neutron
diffraction analysis at the Oak Ridge Graphite Reactor. Shull got the
most recent Nobel Prize in Physics for that work. Had Wollan lived,
he would have become the only health physicist to get the Nobel
Prize. The film badge, as we now know it, was primarily Wollan's
doing and the collection here has a couple of his original personal
film badges.

With luck, Ron Kathren will add to this.

Best wishes

Paul Frame