How Marie Curie Created Mobile X-Ray Units In WW I

Galileo Galilei

When Germany declared war on France in August of 1914, Marie Curie  was seeing the finishing touches put on the first Radium Institute she had worked tirelessly to create. A month later, on the 2nd September, 1914, 3 German bombs landed on Paris. She finally had a completed Radium institute, with no one left to run it. All able bodied technicians had been drafted into the army. The government relocated to Bordeaux and people were evacuating Paris for safer ground. 

But Marie Curie chose to stay.

Just 3 years earlier she had received her second Nobel prize, this time for “the advancements of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium” (her first was in 1903 for Physics, along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel for their work with radioactivity).

Through her research work with x rays she knew there was something she could do to help the war effort, and perhaps save lives. She knew that wounded soldiers were best served if they were operated on as soon as possible, and radiology units could assist surgeons in their diagnosis of injuries, particularly bone fractures and shrapnel locations, and help avoid amputations when in fact limbs could be saved. She lobbied the French government about how vital a military radiology unit would be in saving lives. Along with the Union of Women of France (a major French women's organization), the government gave her some funding to set up her unit. She was now the Director of the Red Cross Radiology Service. She also received donations of money and vehicles from wealthy acquaintances.

But although she had lectured about x-rays at the Paris University, she had no practical knowledge of using an x-ray machine. So she set about teaching herself with a crash course on radiology and anatomy, despite the inherent risks of radiation exposure.. Seeing as the machines were to be mobile she also taught herself about auto mechanics and how to drive, as she planned on staying at the forefront of the mobile units, operating the equipment herself.

She persuaded auto shops to transform cars into vans. Any equipment they required she would badger manufacturers to do their part and donate equipment.  By the end of October 1914, she had her first of 20 mobile radiology units ready to go. The French soldiers affectionately called the vans “petites Curies” (Little Curies).

When she had sufficiently trained herself to operate the equipment, she set about training the medical staff, radiologists and technicians to use the equipment effectively. She was assisted by a military doctor and her seventeen year old daughter Irene. The equipment they were training on included portable x-ray machines, designed by Curie herself, along with photographic darkrooms. Along with carrying the x-ray equipment, the vans needed to be equipped with generators to run them. Along with the installation of the 20 mobile units they oversaw the installation of 200 radiology units into field hospitals in the first year of the war.

Once the radiological services were operational, and it became clear the German army was not about to reach Paris, Curie turned her attention to creating a radiotherapy service. She used a technique pioneered in Dublin to extract a radioactive gas from radium called radon. She sealed the gas in thin glass tubes about one centimetre long and sent them to military and civilian hospitals. Doctors placed the tubes in platinum needles and put them within patients bodies and directly where the radiation would effectively destroy diseased tissue.

Estimates suggest over one million soldiers were treated by Curies mobile radiology units during the war. When the war ended on November 11th, 1918 Curie’s work did not stop there. For the next year after the war she continued her war related work, including offering radiology courses to American soldiers awaiting transport home.

After the war, Curie’s daughter Irène was awarded a military medal for her service, but Marie Curie received no recognition for her incredible war efforts. This may have been an ongoing result of xenophobia created by the right wing press because of a love affair between her and the married (But estranged) French physicist Paul Langevin a few years prior to the war. Curie was painted as a foreign “homewrecker” bringing dishonour to her late husband Pierre, who had died 6 years prior in 1906.

By the autumn of 1919, Curie could finally return to the now completed Radium Institute to resume her research into radioactivity. The Institute would go on to produce four more Nobel prize winners, including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Marie would spend most of her remaining life working for the institute.

In series 3, episode 3 Kennardley interviews Marie Curie about her extraordinary life and achievements. Click below to have a listen.

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