While radiology students unwrapped stacks of framed X-rays in the School of Medicine lobby, I listened in as they helped set up the traveling exhibit Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project. I didn’t understand all of the radiology terminology, but it was clear that they were impressed by the images.

And even without any medical training, it was obvious that the X-rays reflected painful and debilitating injuries — a bone should not have broken nails and bolts in it.

Creator Diane Covert forces the viewer to think about the effects of terrorism on people. Since 2007, her exhibit has traveled to hospitals, universities and medical schools around the country with the hope of bringing attention to the victims of terrorist attacks. When asked how she became involved in this issue, Covert said that even before 9/11, but especially after, she noted a great public interest in terrorists — their biographical information, where they come from, their socioeconomic status and such, but almost no media attention was given to the victims. As a photographer, she considered putting spotlight on the victims through photography but decided this would be too gruesome. The challenge was to find a way to show what victims of terror attacks had endured without frightening the viewer. X-rays and CT scans seemed to be the perfect solution.

The scans come from the two largest hospitals in Jerusalem, but Covert seemed to regard this as almost insignificant; she insisted that it does not matter where the attacks happen or who they happen to or what the stakes are.

What is important, Covert said, is that, “All the victims are human beings, and weaponizing humans to destroy other humans is not OK. The political reasons for the anger may be totally legitimate, but the expression of that anger in the form of terrorism is never acceptable.”

Covert said she compiled the images to be powerful and empathy-inducing, regardless of the medical background of the viewer. Still, different levels of knowledge may cause people to react more strongly to certain images.

Most appalling was an X-ray of someone with a watch lodged in their neck. But Covert said the director of radiology at Stanford Gary Glazer was floored by an image not particularly horrifying to the untrained eye: Apparently the veins were close to collapsing, and the arm was a sure amputation.

“It is very straight-forward: A physician needs a certain image, the technologist makes it, and as a byproduct we have this documentation,” Covert said. “They are functional, medical documents, but they have a secondary value as a record, a pure record … of what happened without imposing personal or political views.”

Due to these benefits, Covert believes that radiology plays a crucial role in the documentation of violence and cruelty and said she follows in the steps of Goya, Picasso, Matthew Brady and other artists who have given their talents to protest.

“Radiology technologists have inadvertently become the documenters of their era,” Covert said.

—Contact Kelsey Harper.