Marie Curie’s wartime radiography units provided X-rays.
During World War I, Curie recognized that battlefield surgeons needed images of bullets, shrapnel, and broken bones before operating. She helped create mobile radiography vehicles equipped with X-ray apparatus and electrical generators. These vehicles became known as the petites Curies, or “Little Curies.”
Curie directed France’s Red Cross Radiology Service and established the country’s first military radiology centre by late 1914. She also helped train operators, including women, to run the equipment near the front. Her daughter Irène assisted her at the beginning of the war, when Irène was only 17.
The units used X-rays, not radioactive rays emitted by radium as their primary imaging method. X-rays pass through the body at different rates, producing images that can reveal dense materials such as bone and metal fragments. Curie also worked with radium emanation, later identified as radon, for medical purposes, but that was a separate wartime application.
Her mobile service brought radiology closer to wounded soldiers and helped doctors make faster, more informed decisions about treatment. More than a million wounded soldiers are estimated to have been examined using her X-ray units.