Dr. John J. Wild, Pioneer of Diagnostic Ultrasound  

Clinical Research

During a particularly productive 15-month period from the spring of 1949 to the end of June 1950, alone and without formal funding, but with the good will of the Wold Chamberlain Naval Air Base staff, Dr. Wild carried out primary research demonstrating production of ultrasonic echoes and other acoustic parameters of various kinds of soft biological tissue.  Building on his discovery that soft biological tissue reflected ultrasound, Dr. Wild devised protocols and personally constructed instruments operating off the Naval Flight Trainer with which he was able to detect an unsuspected tumor in a brain specimen and to diagnose one small cancerous tumor and one small benign tumor in the female living breast.  

To prove the harmlessness of his use of high frequency pulse-echo ultrasound on living human tissue, Dr. Wild used himself as a test subject.  The harmlessness of diagnostic ultrasound allows repeated examination without damage to the patient; whereas x-ray examination is invasive and repeated use can cause harm.  

In a highly productive post-discovery period in the 1950s, with only minimal financial support from sponsoring agencies, Dr. Wild created what has been credited as the first interdisciplinary clinical research team, which was at the time no easy task given the strict academic divisions that took place among the hard sciences.  

Under Dr. Wild's direction, his group developed instrumentation for implementing his concepts of how ultrasound could be applied in the clinic, which resulted in a number of primary discoveries in this newly emerging field. 

Dr. Wild was the first person to produce ultrasonic images of the living human subject and the first to produce these images in real-time -- an extremely important technical aspect in medical diagnosis.  Dr. Wild's ultrasonic imaging technique was the first medical imaging modality since Roentgen's discoveries of the x-rays in 1895.  

Last modified: January 13, 2003