A Compressed History of Thermography

Clinical thermography is older than almost every imaging technology it competes with today — and knowing its story, including its high-stakes missteps, changes how you present a thermal finding to a referring colleague. We trace the field from antiquity to the modern lab.

In this episode:

• Ancient roots: the Edwin Smith Papyrus (1600 BC) and Hippocrates' wet-clay method for finding inflammation — later reproduced and confirmed by modern researchers
• The birth of objective temperature: Galileo's thermoscope (1592) and the Celsius scale (1742)
• 1800: William Herschel discovers infrared radiation — the direct ancestor of every thermal camera
• The medical instrument and the crisis: Hardy, Pennes, Lawson's 1956 Thermoscan, and the 1970s–80s reputational damage caused by marketing thermography as a replacement for mammography
• The modern recovery: microbolometer sensors, the Glamorgan protocol, and automated screening during H1N1 and COVID-19

The takeaway for your practice: always present thermal findings as a physiological adjunct — never as a standalone replacement for structural imaging.