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How Did Marie Curie Use X-Ray

Decent Essays

Shreya Vallimanalan
7-7
12/5/2015

Marie Curie and the Exploration of Radium During the early nineteenth century, French physicist Henri Becquerel observed radioactivity by recording how uranium emits radiation that is strong enough to blacken covered photographic plates. Scientists used to believe that uranium emitted “rays”, after they headed about Becquerel’s work. Later on, after Curie’s research, they came to know that those “rays” were actually very small particles. Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays, which led Marie Curie to use x-ray treatment during World War I to heal thousands of wounded soldiers and educate thousands of women about this technique. Without Roentgen’s early discoveries, Marie Curie would not have been able to …show more content…

Marie Curie noticed that so many soldiers during the war were getting injured and she wanted some way to treat many soldiers at once, by knowing what type of injuries they had, like bullet or shrapnel injuries and broken bones. x-rays show a very clear and detailed picture of a person’s spinal structure. In earlier times, many people did not have access to x-rays, so it would be very hard for doctors to figure out what injuries a particular person had. According to the American Institute of Physics, during World War I, Marie Curie trained 150 women in how to use x-rays to treat people. She established a radiotherapy center, where she would use radon gas and grams of radium to destroy any diseased tissue in a person’s body. She also invented “radiology cars”. She and her daughter Irene went to different automobile companies and transformed ordinary cars into radiology cars. Later on, they began to be called “petite Curies”. The cars would be loaded with equipment, a doctor, technician, and driver. Once the car arrives at the desired destination, the team will take half an hour, at the most, to unpack and set up all of the equipment. Then, they would start treating the patients. Most of the treatments performed with radiology cars were x-ray treatments on patients. These vehicles were very useful, especially since World War I was a very hard time of war. Another reason for …show more content…

Henri Becquerel studied how uranium emitted radiation. Using this discovery as her thesis topic, Marie Curie wanted to know more. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, she wondered whether or not there were other elements that emitted radiation. She soon discovered that thorium emitted radiation as well. She came to the conclusion that radioactivity does not depend on how the atoms are arranged into molecules, but with the atoms themselves. For this revolutionary discovery, Marie and Pierre Curie won a Nobel Prize in Physics. She even coined the term “radioactivity”, which is the disintegration of an unstable nucleus by the change of the energy level of the nucleus by gamma-ray emission. She also changed scientists’ views on atoms. Originally, scientists believed that atoms were unbreakable bits of matter, but Marie Curie proved them wrong. She stated that radium atoms break apart into several smaller atoms of all different sizes. This was one of her greatest motivations to discover two incredibly radioactive elements, radium and polonium. She also proved that rays are actually energy that is released from within the atom, rather than the age old belief that rays came from the surface of the material. She worked with J.J. Thompson, using x-rays, to figure out that atoms were not just the smallest bits of matter, since there were rays that are made up of even smaller

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