Marie Curie died on 4 July.
She died on 4 July 1934 at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, in France’s Haute-Savoie region. Curie was 66 years old. The date is sometimes misremembered because her death followed decades of unusually intense scientific and medical work.
Her recorded cause of death was aplastic anaemia, a condition in which the bone marrow fails to produce enough blood cells. The illness was widely associated with her long-term exposure to ionising radiation, although later assessments have also highlighted her wartime work with poorly shielded X-ray equipment.
Curie’s death came only months after her final visit to Poland. She was first buried in Sceaux beside Pierre Curie. In 1995, their remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, making Marie Curie the first woman honoured there for her own achievements. Her laboratory notebooks and papers remain radioactive enough to require special handling.