Drs. Neuhauser, Caffey, Holt, Silverman and Taybi at the 1975 meeting in Atlanta Georgia

John Patrick Caffey was born in 1895, the year of Roentgen's discovery. He was trained in internal medicine at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis and at the University of Michigan and then in pediatrics at Babies Hospital in New York. His academic career in pediatrics was well underway at Babies Hospital when, in 1929, he was abruptly assigned to take charge of radiology as the hospital's first in-house radiologist (the position was actually titled "roentgenologist"). At first he tried to avoid this added duty, but he found he enjoyed it. He began to realize that the field was wide open for a physician of scholarly bent and pediatric background, and he seized his opportunity. He rapidly taught himself the range of normal appearances and the plain-film manifestations of children's diseases. His first radiologic articles dealt with the findings in lead poisoning, rickets, the hemolytic anemias, hemophilia, and syphilis. His meticulous, disciplined approach led, in 1945, to the first edition of Pediatric X-ray Diagnosis, a major step toward establishing pediatric radiology as a discipline within pediatrics (as Dr. Caffey probably expected) and radiology (as it turned out). The second edition of this enormously influential book was published in 1950 and the third edition in 1956. His description of infantile cortical hyperostoses ("Caffey's disease") appeared in 1945, and his observations on the frequent presence of fractures in the long bones of infants suffering from subdural hematomas- that is, battered children-were published in 1946, both in the American Journal of Roentgenology. During the 1950s he produced a whole series of reports defining the normal radiologic appearance of various bones and establishing the normality of several findings that had previously been considered pathologic. 

Interviews with SPR members on the occasion of the Society's 50th anniversary.