Precedence for prostate brachytherapy.

Purpose: To identify the earliest practitioners of prostate brachytherapy.

Methods And Materials: Review of contemporary literature.

Results: Radiotherapy has been used for benign prostatic ailments as early as 1902.

Howard Kelly establishes gynecologic brachytherapy in the United States.

Purpose: Exploration of Howard Atwood Kelly's contributions to gynecologic brachytherapy.

Methods And Materials: Review of contemporary journals, texts, newspaper accounts, and the memoirs of Kelly's associates. Information from unpublished material, including Kelly's handwritten notes and diaries, was culled from the Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Classics in brachytherapy: Margaret Cleaves introduces gynecologic brachytherapy.

Intracavitary treatment of gynecologic cancers has been the anchor of brachytherapy, and perhaps the greatest success of radiotherapy, for over a century. The woman who first performed the procedure was neither a surgeon nor radiologist, but an electrotherapeutist who began her career as an alienist. She pursued a prolific academic career despite being disabled by a disease that is no longer recognized.