I am now way over 50 years old, but one thing stands out from when I was very young, my sister dying of leukemia when she was only 2 years old. She had recently been in one of those shoe stores where they looked at your feet with xrays. I wanted to look at my feet too but they said it was too dangerous. My little sister was examined with the device to fit her with shoes. It was no time at all that my parents were teling me that my little sister was sick, and then we were having a funeral for her. Some how someway she had gotten leukemia and was gone. I see her grave stone when I visit the cemetary, she died in 1947. Why did that happen? Who killed her?
Children get leukemia, and were getting leukemia long before flouroscopes were invented. Not to belittle your loss, but it’s entirely possible no-one “killed” your sister. Isaac Asimov wrote an interesting essay called “The Enemy Within” which discussed radioactive isotopes and whatnot, the idea being that if (numbers made up from memory) one percent of the world’s potassium is actually an unstable isotope form, and each cell in our bodies contains and requires potassium, the odds are quite likely that some small percentage of our cells are breaking apart quite regularly. Most times, the cell remnants aren’t viable and quickly die off, but sometimes what is left forms the basis of a new cell, a cancer cell, which quickly replicates and can overwhelm the host.
I doubt this is any solace, but trying to assess blame at this late date and with insufficient evidence is kinda fruitless.
madshoe??? That’s a hell of a user name for this question. Anyway, welcome to the SDMB.
Cecil has actually dispensed the straight dope on shoe store fluoroscopes and cancer, here:
Were those old shoe store fluoroscopes a health hazard?
Short version: They weren’t good for you.