Ron the Yarn Spinner

 

                 When the Shoe Fits, You’re Happy

                                              

                           

You know this story:

The soldiers ask Cinderella to try on the shoe. Much to the resistance of her stepmother, Cinderella puts it on her foot; it fits her perfectly. She shows the soldiers the other shoe. It is a matching pair. The Prince is so happy to find Cinderella, he marries her and the two live happily ever after.

 

We all know how happy we are when we have a good-fitting pair of shoes, but what is our size? How do we know?                                             

King Edward II of England declared the barleycorn as the basis for shoe measurement. He ruled that the length of three barleycorns were equivalent to one inch, making this the standard for sizing. Got that? I know. What is a barleycorn? Someone came up with a better way to measure feet.

It is simply known as The Brannock Device, the standard foot measuring tool for the world's footwear industry. But few people can call it by name, much less identify its inventor, Charles Brannock.

 

As a student at Syracuse University Brannock wanted to find the best way to measure the foot. He played around with the idea for a couple of years and finally built a prototype. How? He used an Erector set. In 1927, Brannock patented the device and created a company to build it. Over one million have been sold. The same year, a patent was approved for a different device to help ensure your wingtips, pumps or Buster Browns fit exactly right.

                  

 Enter the dawn of the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope.

The machines were four feet high and made of metal covered in wood. At the bottom was an opening ledge where an adult or child could place his or her feet. At the top of the machine were three viewing portholes. An estimated 16,000 machines were sold. Devices like this one were common in shoe stores around the world for decades.

I was just a kid. Still, Uncle Johnny (See later post) warned me about radiation from our television set. How safe was this gizmo? And the shoe salesman did not strike me as “Mr. Wizard” but more like an Al Bundy. What did he know? I did not like using the machine when Mom took me shoe shopping.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the machines made their way into shoe stores in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Germany, and Switzerland. They were used to provide parents with the assurance that their child's shoes would fit exactly right.

Children were instructed to wiggle their toes to demonstrate how much room there was inside the shoe. Both the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoe were clearly visible.

The atomic bombs blasts at the end of WW II shed a new light (literally) on anything irradiating and in the following two years these machines were shown to be an ineffective means of fitting shoes, but more importantly, a health risk. During a 20-second viewing time, American-made machines delivered about thirteen roentgens of exposure. (British Pedoscopes were less powerful.) Although the beam of radiation was directed at the feet, a large amount would scatter in all directions. Consequently, a shoe salesmen received a whole-body dose of radiation, as did anyone else standing near the machines. A salesman standing by the machine for only two hours received a year’s worth of natural radiation exposure.

There are records of shoe salesmen suffering radiation burns requiring amputation in 1950, a case of dermatitis with ulceration in 1957, and a diagnosis of basal cell carcinoma in 2004. It is likely that many more salesmen were affected. According to a report in the Wisconsin Medical Journal, the machines may have led to a high incidence of foot cancer.

 

The machines were banned in most states by 1970. Due to the lack of records, however, there is no way to correlate cancers that arise many years later to those who were exposed to radiation by the shoe-fitting Foot-O-Scope.

Today, while radiation is not used casually but in treating cancer and in medical testing, I always remember a good friend and our family attorney whose thyroid was effectively destroyed because of it. The doctor used it to treat his acne.

In general, the cancer risk from a single medical test or procedure is low, but the skyrocketing growth in the use of CT scans — from eight million in 1990 to over sixty-two million today — suggests that medical imaging may be adding to the cancer burden. A report from the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center estimated that radiation from CT scans now accounts for 1.5% of all cancers in the United States.

Most tests for heart disease, for example, are important, even necessary. A stress test using thallium or technetium can tell how the heart functions when it needs to work harder. (Done that). Some tests, though, may not be worth the radiation received. The value of coronary calcium scans and cardiac CT scans has not yet been established, especially when they are used for healthy people "just to see" what shape the heart's arteries are in. (This might have been my trip to Heart Check America.)

You would never agree to (non-cosmetic) surgery unless you need it. Right? A similar principle should apply to medical testing that involves radiation. Agree to it when the test will give you and your doctor valuable information about your health or your body. And even then, see if it is possible to get the lowest dose of radiation possible.

Age is a crucial factor. It usually takes 10 to 20 years before DNA damaged by a low dose of radiation leads to cancer. The older you are, then, the lower the chances that radiation poses a threat. On the other hand, the hazards of radiation for kids and young adults are higher.