History of Shaken Baby Theories Exposed: How an Elite Group of Pediatric Radiologists Started Medical Kidnapping in the 1940s
The discovery of the x-ray in 1895 gave rise to a group of doctors who claimed to be able to read the x-rays and find the subtle signs of child abuse that everybody else missed. It took decades for their rhetoric to be accepted by the public, but when it was finally embraced, it was not long after that The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA) was passed by a bipartisan Congress, establishing what we now know as Child Protective Services. Most historians trace the modern era of Child Welfare to the landmark paper, "The Battered-Child Syndrome" by Dr. C. Henry Kempe and his colleagues, published in 1962. The history of this paper, and this line of thinking, owes its roots to a man named Dr. John Patrick Caffey who was born in Utah in 1895, the year that Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen accidentally discovered the x-ray, which was originally known as the "roentgen ray." A new, controversial field of "Pediatric Radiologists" was born, the fore-runners of today's "Child Abuse Pediatricians" and Child Protective Social Services.