We bet you can correctly guess what this is within three tries. Obviously, it’s a woman’s chest x-ray. But whose x-ray would people be so obsessed with they’d buy it at auction? We’re sure you came up with Marilyn Monroe pretty quickly. Yes, it was today in 1954 that she was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for surgery for endometriosis, a condition of the womb which caused her a lot of physical pain. She was admitted as Marilyn DiMaggio, interestingly.
This image of her chest was made by a radiology resident, and when that student later became a doctor and taught at the school he would show this to his students, which we guess was a good way to keep them interested during a lecture. Eventually the scan “migrated” into private hands (those of the doctor’s daughter), and it went up for
auction and sold for $45,000 in 2010. That makes us about seven years late on this story, but the image so interested us we thought we’d post it anyway. If beauty were measured this way we have a funny feeling Monroe would still set the standard.
