Petite Curies

Marie Skłodowska Curie was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist. In 1898, she, along with her Physicist husband Pierre Curie, discovered polonium and radium, two radioactive elements. They went on to find that when exposed to radium, diseased, tumor-forming cells were destroyed faster than healthy cells, the basis for radiation cancer therapy. In 1903, the two were awarded the Nobel prize in Physics along with Henri Becquerel for work on radiation, making Marie Curie the first woman to win a Nobel prize.

Pierre Curie was killed in a road accident in 1906. Marie Curie continued on to successfully isolate radium in 1910. She also defined an international standard for radioactive emissions that was eventually named curie. In 1911, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and its isolation. To this day, she is the only person to have been awarded the Nobel prize in two different scientific disciplines: Physics and Chemistry.

X-rays, a type of electromagnetic radiation, had been discovered in 1895 by another Nobel laureate, Wilhelm Roentgen. Almost immediately after its discovery, physicians began using X-rays to image patients’ bones and find foreign objects like shrapnel and bullets. But, when the first World War started in 1914, X-ray machines were still found only in city hospitals, far from the battlefields. Placing X-ray machines close to the front lines would make it possible to more quickly treat wounded soldiers, thereby saving limbs and lives. So, she decided to build mobile X-ray units.

Curie approached wealthy Parisian women to donate automotive vehicles. She persuaded French manufacturers of X-ray equipment to donate it along with portable electric generators called dynamos. She asked local auto body shops to voluntarily outfit the vehicles with a dynamo to generate electricity, X-ray equipment to take X-rays and a darkroom to develop X-ray negatives. The first of such cars, called petite curies (little Curies) played an important role in the battle of Marne in 1914 that kept the Germans from entering Paris.

Curie herself took crash courses on how to operate the X-ray equipment and on human anatomy so she could learn how to read the film. She learned how to drive a car, change flat tires and clean the carburetor in a car. She trained women to operate the X-ray equipment, process X-ray negatives and interpret X-ray films based on the knowledge of human anatomy. The little Curies helped treat more than a million wounded soldiers. Curie herself helped treat at least a thousand men.