The petites Curies: mobile X-ray units

In August 1914 the French army had almost no radiology, and most of the new war hospitals had no X-ray apparatus at all. Marie Curie first carried France's research radium, about one gram, to safety in Bordeaux in a lead box, and came straight back.

As director of the Red Cross radiology service she collected apparatus from laboratories and makers, persuaded friends to donate cars, had them converted into vans, and fitted each with an X-ray tube and a dynamo driven by the car's engine. The first was ready in late October 1914. She learned to drive, studied anatomy and mechanics, and went to the front herself: Amiens, Calais, Dunkirk, Furnes, Poperinghe, Verdun. Her seventeen-year-old daughter Irène worked with her and later alone near Ypres.

Because operators kept being transferred, she trained women at the Radium Institute from 1916, 150 of them by her count. "The use of the X-rays during the war saved the lives of many wounded men," she wrote; "it also saved many from long suffering and lasting infirmity." And: "To hate the very idea of war, it ought to be sufficient to see once what I have seen so many times."