Running header: IAN DONALD

Ian Donald
McKenzie Hosenfeld
Salt Lake Community College
Biographical Term Paper
Howard Demars
October 2, 2015

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Ian Donald

Now a popular and commonly used instrument in hospitals and clinics alike, the
ultrasound machine was created in 1956 by a team of medical researchers in Glasgow, Scotland.
The head of this group was a professor named Dr. Ian Donald. To understand how Ian Donald
came up with the inspiration to invent the ultrasound machine, it is necessary to tell the story of
his life.
Ian Donald was born in Cornwall, Scotland on December 2, 1910. Early in his childhood,
he and his family moved to South Africa, where he attended the University of Cape Town. There,
he chose to study Music and French. After he graduated with Honors in Arts, he began attending
medical school at St Thomass Hospital in London. His studies were disrupted by the Second
World War, in which he decided to serve in the Royal Air Force Medical Branch. (Ian DonaldDiagnostician and Moralist) When Japan surrendered to the Allies and the army was disband,
Donald returned to St. Thomass, where he finished his studies and became an obstetrician and
gynecologist.
While the work he accomplished in the medical branch of the Royal Air Force was
starkly different than his work in obstetrics and gynecology, he used many of his wartime
experiences in his new field. (History of Ultrasound) The first time he was introduced to radar
sciences was while he serving in the war; this technology was used on boats in Glasgow
shipyards to look for flaws and weaknesses in the hulls metallurgy. He also acquired an
understanding of echo-sounding, a recent development that was used to detect the presence and

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movement of submarines. He often credited his experiences in the Royal Air Force to his
discovery of using ultrasounds upon his patients.
Ian Donald began investigating the use of sonography for medical diagnosis in the 1950s
when he visited a boiler-making company to use their instruments to scan tumors and lumps. He
was surprised at the unrestricted view he had while looking at the soft-tissues,a large difference
to the images produced by x-ray machines. With x-rays alone, it was difficult to identify
abnormalities in soft tissues, but by using their new machine, they were much easier to
recognize. He quickly realized the benefits that his machine would have on diagnostic imaging.
Donalds discovery is what we now refer to as ultrasound or sonography. Ultrasound
waves are high frequency sound waves produced by a hand-held probe, also called a transducer.
These sounds waves are silent to the human ear because they are within the frequencies of 2 and
18. (Ultrasound) The transducer both emits ultrasound waves and also detects the ultrasound
echos that are reflected back. The materials that make up the probes are made of special ceramic
materials that produce sound waves when an electrical current passes through them. The probe
sends sound waves into the body and the reflection of the waves back produces the images that
are seen on the ultrasound machine.
Ian Donald and his team published an article about the the ultrasound machine in The
Lancet, a medical newspaper based in the United Kingdom. Entitled, Investiagion of abdominal
masses by pulsed ultrasound, the article describes the research and results that Donald and his
team gained by scanning more than 100 pateints with their simple ultrasound machine. (Ian
Donald )Their machine, which they refered to as The Spinner, was a rough prototype made by

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assembling any materials that they could get their hands on. Tom Brown, the researcher in charge
of building the machine, said that building it was a case of scrounging for parts wherever I
could. These parts including bits of Maccno and a hospital bed.
Because of his passion in obstetrics and gynecology, he first used his new invention to
discover information on growing fetuses in wombs. He quickly realized that by using his
machine to study the fetus growth and development, he was able to diagnose abnormality in the
fetuses and use those tools to make pregnancy and labor safer. (Ian Donald and the birth of
obstetric ultrasound) In just a few short years after the ultrasound machine was developed, it
because a routine part of pre-natal care.
While ultrasound is widely used today, the medical field in the 1950s and 1960s was
suspicious of the images that came from Donalds invention. For many years after the discovery,
Ian Donald set out to prove the efficiency of the ultrasound machine. He noted the case of a
woman who was diagnosed with an inoperable stomach cancer. After performing a vaginal
ultrasound and finding an ovarian cyst, she was operated on and recovered entirely. On another
occasion, Donald and colleage Tom Duggan, a physicist, used their machine to measure babies
heads on multiple women. (The Development of Ultrasound )Through the images, they were able
to recognize problems such as fetal abnormality and hemorrhaging. As Donald had more and
more positive experiences, the ultrasound machine became less taboo and was eventually used
by doctors for a wide array of diagnostic needs.
In time, he grew to understand that this new development in technology could be used in
more applications than simply fetuses. Ian Donald had a personal need for his ultrasound

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machine when his doctor diagnosed him with severe heart disesase that required major heart
sugery. A bit doubtful of his doctorss diagnosis, Donald used his invention, The Spinner, to
scan his heart to find evidence that the surgery was required. Only after studying his heart and
diagnosing himself with heart disease did Donald permit to be operated on. (A Short History of
the Development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology)
The medical world has benefited greatly through Ian Donalds inspiration to create the
ultrasound machine. Not only are used to check on babies in wombs, but are also used to detect
problems in the liver, heart, kidney, abdomen, or sexual organs. Ultrasounds are becoming more
popular than ever because it is a safe diagnostic tool and do not emit radiation, unlike x-rays.
Our societys health has improved because of Ian Donald and his invention, the ultrasound
machine.

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Citation

History of Ultrasound. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.ultrasoundschoolsinfo.com/history/

Ian Donald- Diagnostician and Moralist. Malcolm Nicolson Centre for the History of Medicine
University of Glasgow. (2010).

Ian Donald. Brought to Life. Science Museum UK, 2011. Web.

J Willocks, Ian Donald and the birth of obstetric ultrasound, Obstetric ultrasound, 1 (1993), pp
1-18

Ultrasound. National Institute on Biomedical Imaging and Biomedical Engineering . (2008).

Retrieved September 1, 2008.

Withers, Blithe. "The Development of Ultrasound." Web. (2015)

Woo, Joseph. "A Short History of the Development of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and
Gynecology." 2002. Web.