Marie Skłodowska-Curie's X-ray cars

In the autumn of 1914 Marie Skłodowska-Curie, twice a Nobel Prize winner, set off from Paris for the hospitals behind the front in a car fitted with an X-ray apparatus. She was accompanied by a military doctor and her seventeen-year-old daughter Irène, her first assistant. The first such vehicle was ready at the end of October. According to some accounts, on 1 November the scientist drove it to a hospital near Creil, north of Paris, although the military at first looked on her idea with reluctance. Other sources speak more generally of a first trip to the front in October or in the autumn of 1914. So began a radiological service that by the end of the war had helped doctors examine hundreds of thousands of wounded.

The outbreak of war found Marie Curie in Paris, in the newly completed building of the Radium Institute. Her colleagues went into the army. At the beginning of September, as the Germans approached the capital and the government moved to Bordeaux, she took there by train, in a lead container, France’s entire research stock of radium, a single gram, and left it in a bank safe. She herself returned to Paris. She decided that she could be of most use to her adopted country through X-rays. An X-ray made it possible to find a bullet or a shell splinter in a wounded man’s body and to see a broken bone before the surgeon began to operate. Without it doctors searched for projectiles blindly, and many wounded men had limbs amputated that could have been saved. Yet most hospitals, especially those near the front, had no apparatus at all.

Curie gathered equipment from Paris laboratories and persuaded the authorities to let her organise military radiology units. She became director of the Red Cross radiology service. The money for the first car came from a women’s charity, the Union des Femmes de France. Further cars were donated by wealthy acquaintances, workshops converted them into vans, and equipment makers supplied the apparatus. The current for the X-ray tube came from a dynamo driven by the car’s engine, so the team did not need mains electricity. The vehicle could drive up to any field hospital and quickly set up an X-ray unit there. The scientist, who until then had lectured on X-rays only in theory, hurriedly learned anatomy, how to operate the apparatus, how to drive a car and how to repair it.

The soldiers soon nicknamed these cars “little Curies” (petites Curies). In December 1914, at the request of the Belgian army, Marie and Irène drove in their own car to Furnes, in the strip of Belgium that the Germans had failed to take in the Battle of the Yser. By the end of the war she had organised a fleet of about 20 cars and some 200 permanent radiology rooms in hospitals. From 1916 she trained women as radiology technicians at the Radium Institute. According to the most commonly cited figures she trained about 150 of them. She drove the cars and examined the wounded herself, and after a year of practice Irène ran a front-line unit on her own. It is estimated that over a million wounded were examined in French X-ray units during the war, although Curie herself gave a figure of about 900,000 at the end of 1918. Neither mother nor daughter was properly protected from the radiation.