When World War I broke out in August 1914, Marie Curie was fifty-six years old, a two-time Nobel laureate, and the most famous scientist in France. She had discovered polonium and radium. She had proved that radioactivity is an atomic property. She held the chair of physics at the Sorbonne, the first woman to do so. She could have spent the war in her laboratory, continuing her research in safety and comfort.
Instead, she went to the front lines. Within weeks of the war’s outbreak, Curie recognized that the French military medical services had almost no capacity for battlefield radiography. Wounded soldiers with bullets, shrapnel, and bone fragments lodged in their bodies were being operated on without X-rays, a situation that led to unnecessary amputations, infections, and deaths. Curie decided to fix this problem herself.
The Problem of Battlefield X-Rays
Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered X-rays in 1895, and by 1914 the technology was well established in hospitals. But the machines were large, fragile, and required stable electrical power. They were designed for permanent installations, not for the chaotic, constantly shifting conditions of a battlefield. The few X-ray units available to the French military were stationed far behind the lines, in base hospitals that wounded soldiers might not reach for hours or days.
Curie understood that the X-ray equipment needed to go to the wounded, not the other way around. Soldiers with complex injuries needed radiographic examination as quickly as possible, ideally within hours of being wounded, so that surgeons could locate foreign objects and plan operations accurately. Waiting days for a soldier to be transported to a base hospital was costing lives.
Her solution was simple in concept and extraordinarily difficult in execution: build mobile X-ray units that could be driven to field hospitals near the front lines, set up quickly, take radiographs, and move on to the next hospital.
Building the Petites Curies
Curie began by converting a standard Renault automobile into a mobile radiography unit. She installed an X-ray machine, a photographic darkroom, and a dynamo (generator) that could be powered by the car’s engine. The equipment was compact enough to fit inside the vehicle but complete enough to produce diagnostic-quality radiographs in field conditions.
The first mobile unit was ready by October 1914, just two months after the war began. Curie personally drove it to the front. She was accompanied by her seventeen-year-old daughter Irène, who served as her assistant and who would later become a Nobel laureate herself.
The mobile X-ray units were quickly nicknamed “petites Curies” (little Curies) by the soldiers and medical staff who used them. Over the course of the war, Curie organized the construction of twenty such vehicles, each equipped for independent operation at field hospitals. She also established 200 fixed radiography stations at military hospitals throughout France.
Training and Organization
Building the machines was only part of the challenge. Curie also needed trained operators. She set up a training program at the Radium Institute in Paris, teaching women (many of them volunteers with no previous scientific background) how to operate X-ray equipment, develop radiographic plates, and interpret the resulting images well enough to assist surgeons.
By the end of the war, Curie had trained approximately 150 women as radiography operators. She wrote a textbook on wartime radiography, La Radiologie et la Guerre (Radiology and the War), published in 1921, that documented her methods and served as a manual for future military medical applications of X-ray technology.
At the Front
Curie did not direct the operation from Paris. She spent long periods at or near the front lines, personally operating the mobile X-ray units. She learned to drive (unusual for a woman of her generation), obtained a driver’s license, and drove the Renault through roads that were often muddy, cratered by shellfire, and under the threat of bombardment.
The conditions at field hospitals were grim. Curie worked in tents and damaged buildings, often by candlelight when generators failed. She changed flat tires on muddy roads. She dealt with military bureaucrats who were skeptical of a civilian woman giving orders to soldiers. She was exposed to heavy doses of X-ray radiation (the dangers of which were not yet fully understood) with minimal protective equipment.
Irène Curie, still a teenager, proved equally resilient. She operated her own mobile unit independently by 1916, traveling alone to field hospitals near the front and performing radiographic examinations under the same dangerous conditions as her mother. After the war, Irène continued in science and, with her husband Frédéric Joliot, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for the discovery of artificial radioactivity.
The Impact
It is estimated that over one million wounded soldiers were examined using Curie’s mobile and fixed radiography units during the war. The X-ray images allowed surgeons to locate bullets and shrapnel precisely, plan operations more effectively, and avoid the exploratory surgery that had been the standard practice before radiography. The reduction in unnecessary amputations and fatal infections was significant, though exact figures are impossible to determine.
Curie’s wartime work also transformed the military’s attitude toward radiography. Before the war, the French military medical service had almost no radiographic capability. By the end of the war, X-ray examination of wounded soldiers was standard practice. This transformation was almost entirely the result of Curie’s personal initiative, organizational skill, and willingness to do the work herself.
The Cost
Curie’s wartime service came at a personal cost that she may not have fully understood at the time. Prolonged exposure to X-ray radiation without adequate shielding contributed to the chronic health problems that plagued her in later years. Combined with decades of exposure to radioactive materials in her laboratory, the cumulative radiation damage led to the aplastic anemia that killed her on July 4, 1934, at the age of sixty-six.
Curie was not unaware of the risks. She knew that radiation could damage biological tissue. But the protective standards of her era were minimal, and the urgency of wartime conditions left little room for caution. She accepted the risks as the price of doing work that she considered necessary.
A Scientist’s Duty
Curie’s wartime work is sometimes overlooked in accounts of her life, which tend to focus on her Nobel Prizes and her discovery of radium. But the petites Curies reveal something essential about her character. She was not content to be a pure researcher. When she saw a problem she could solve, she solved it, even if the solution required learning to drive, building machines, training personnel, and working under fire.
This practical, problem-solving temperament is evident throughout her scientific career. Her doctoral thesis on radioactivity, in which she demonstrated that radioactivity is an atomic property rather than a chemical one, is a model of systematic experimental investigation. Curie did not merely observe that certain substances emitted radiation. She measured the radiation from every known element, systematically, quantitatively, and exhaustively, until the pattern became clear.
Kronecker Wallis’s edition of Marie Curie’s Thesis presents this foundational document in a bilingual French-English edition, with each language beginning from opposite sides of the book. The thesis documents the work that earned Curie her first Nobel Prize and established the atomic nature of radioactivity, the scientific discovery that ultimately made her wartime radiography work possible.
For those interested in the broader history of women in science, from Curie’s laboratory to the lunar craters named after female scientists, Kronecker Wallis’s Portraying Science collection presents the faces and stories of the scientists who shaped our understanding of the physical world.
The Legacy of the Petites Curies
Mobile radiography remains a cornerstone of military and emergency medicine. Modern portable X-ray and CT scanning equipment descends directly from the concept that Curie pioneered in 1914: bring the diagnostic technology to the patient, not the patient to the technology. This principle, obvious in retrospect, was revolutionary at the time.
The petites Curies also represent one of the earliest examples of a scientist mobilizing their expertise for humanitarian purposes during a crisis. Curie did not wait for the government to act. She identified the need, designed the solution, secured the resources, and implemented the system herself. It was a one-woman campaign that saved thousands of lives and transformed military medicine. And she did it all while remaining, in the words of one biographer, “the quietest woman in France.”
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