What is the history of the MRI?

That inventor (no false modesty here) was Raymond Damadian himself, a medical Doctor Who, in June, 1970, used the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance -- now called magnetic resonance or MR -- to distinguish healthy tissue from cancer in mouse specimens.

In March, 1971, Damadian established -- for the first time -- a medical application for MR (see "Tumor Detection..." in the bibliography). The experiment showed that cancer gave off different signals than healthy tissue under magnetic resonance, and Damadian concluded that MRI would become valuable in diagnosis. "The results suggest that this technique may prove useful in the detection of malignant tumors."

At that point, MR, then called nuclear magnetic resonance, had been a tool for physicists and chemists, and it had an honored history: the 1937 discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance won the 1944 Nobel Prize for PhysicE; the 1952 prize recognized advances in the field