Radiation hormesis: its historical foundations as a biological hypothesis.

This paper represents the first systematic effort to describe the historical foundations of radiation hormesis. Spanning the years from 1898 to the early 1940's the paper constructs and assesses the early history of such research and evaluates how advances in related scientific fields affected the course of hormetic related research. The present effort was designed to not only address this gap in current knowledge, but to offer a toxicological basis for how the concept of hormetic dose-response relationships may affect the nature of the bioassay and its role in the risk assessment process.