Frederick John Lovelock was born on 3 June 1869 somewhere in the Marylebone district of Middlesex, the son of Charles Lovelock and Mary Ann Franklin. On 5 February 1890 he took up employment as a Postman and was recorded as such in the 1891 and 1901 Census Returns.

However, at some point after the 1901 Census he went for a complete career change so that by 1911 he had become an X-Ray Operator. He was in the same occupation in 1921, by which time his son Frederick Victor had become an X-Ray Assistant.

These days we take X-Rays, together with associated body-scanning techniques such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Computed Tomography, Ultrasound and Echocardiography, very much for granted as tools that doctors deploy to discover in non-intrusive ways just what is or might be going on inside us. But in 1911 the technique was still relatively new.

X-Rays were discovered in 1895, more or less accidentally, by William Roentgen who was a Professor of Physics in Wurzburg, Bavaria in Germany. He was investigating the effects of electron beams in electrical discharges through low pressure gases and was startled to discover that a screen coated with a fluorescent material would glow even when it was completely shielded from the visible and ultraviolet light of the discharges in the gases. Because he did not know what the radiation was that caused the effect he coined the name X-Rays.

He very soon determined that the rays would pass through most substances, but would leave 'shadows' of solid objects on photographic plates. One of his early and famous photographs showed the bones of the human hand. His discovery was followed by the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and of the electron in 1897, and represented the starting point of all modern atomic physics.

Not surprisingly clinical use of X-Rays blossomed, despite some early reports of injuries that the likes of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla submitted. Whether appropriate safeguards were in place when Frederick John took up his new career who can say? What we do know is that he died at the age of 74 in 1944, having been one of the earliest practitioners in a branch of medicine that so many of us have benefited from.