How Marie Curie developed women-run mobile x-ray machines and radiology labs for military

When war broke out in 1914, Marie Curie had just established the Radium Institute in Paris.

 With German armies   encroaching on the   French capital, Curie   gathered her entire   supply of radium, stashed it in a remote bank vault , and set off to put her science skills to a daring new test.

For the first time, military doctors could detect the most minute pieces bullets and shrapnel lodged in wounds, without having to transport casualties.

Soldiers at the front dubbed the portable X-ray labs “petites Curies” (“little Curies”), and Curie enlisted her teenage daughter, Irène, as her assistant .

Thanks to her determination, an estimated one million Allied soldiers would receive X-rays during the war, saving untold lives in the process.