IV.

Later Years: Radiation in Medicine

During World War I (1914-1918) Marie Curie played an active role in the use of radiation for medical purposes. She helped equip ambulances with X-ray equipment, which she drove to the front lines. The International Red Cross made her head of its Radiological Service. She and her colleagues at the Institut du Radium held courses for medical orderlies and doctors, teaching them how to use the new technique.

By the late 1920s Curie’s health began to deteriorate. Because the dangers of radioactivity were unknown, she had been exposed during her career to massive doses of high-energy radiation (see Radiation Effects, Biological). As a result of this exposure she had to have several cataract operations, and she died of leukemia on July 4, 1934, at a sanatorium at Haute-Savoie in the French Alps. A few months earlier her daughter and son-in-law, the Joliot-Curies, had announced the discovery of artificial radioactivity.

Throughout much of her life Marie Curie was poor, and she and her fellow scientists carried out much of their work extracting radium under primitive conditions. The Curies refused to patent any of their discoveries, wanting them to benefit everyone freely. The Nobel Prize money and other financial rewards were used to finance further research.

Curie became one of the most famous women of her time. She had mixed feelings about her fame because it interfered with her scientific work. However, she was able to use her fame to promote the medical uses of radium by facilitating the foundation of radium therapy institutes in France, Poland, the United States, and elsewhere. One of the outstanding applications of her work has been the use of radiation to treat cancer (see Radiology: Therapeutic Radiology), one form of which cost Curie her life.