The Marbled Register

1914 · Mobile X-Ray Unit · Work 1007 of 1,871

A whitewashed field hospital room north of Paris on a grey November day, a folding wooden table, a grey wool blanket folded on it, a tall stand on a five-footed base with castors holding a glass bulb tube in a clamp, on a side table a switch box with two round meters, plain dials with bare pointers, a green-black marbled notebook lying open beside it with a pen across its blank page, black cables over the plank floor to an open window, outside a pale grey box van with a canvas roof and spoked wheels, and standing at the side table, between the switch box and the stand, the woman, a living figure in the scene and the only person in the room, a slight woman of forty-six with ash-blond hair streaked with grey and loosely pinned up, in a plain dark wool dress under a long white cotton apron, full height and in proportion to the stand and the table, one hand on a black knob of the switch box, her face turned toward the camera in three-quarter view.

Who
Marie Curie, born Maria Skłodowska (1867–1934), was a physicist and chemist and one of the founders of the study of radioactivity. Born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867, she went to Paris to study in 1891 and in 1895 married the physicist Pierre Curie. In 1898 she showed that the radiation of uranium was a general phenomenon; that same year she discovered polonium with her husband and, together with Gustave Bémont, radium. In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, and in 1911 she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone. After Pierre's accidental death in 1906 she became the first woman to hold his chair of general physics at the Sorbonne. The press followed her through fame and scandal, as when her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin became public. Her research had nothing to do with X-rays; even so, in the First World War she became one of the organisers of X-ray diagnosis for the wounded. The radiation that made her famous probably made her ill: she died on 4 July 1934 of an anaemia in which, in the view of the sanatorium director, the bone marrow had probably been damaged by long exposure to radiation.
The moment
On 1 November 1914 Marie Curie began a register. From that day until 13 October 1918 she entered in three large volumes every wounded man she X-rayed herself, with date, name, regiment, site of the wound and type of examination: 948 wounded in the end. Since August she had been collecting X-ray equipment for the Red Cross and the Patronage national des blessés and having cars fitted out: a delivery van with a dynamo on the running board driven by the engine, plus cases for tubes, table, stand and photographic plates. She described a mission herself: the apparatus is carried into the ward and connected by cable to the dynamo on the car, 25 metres usually being enough, and an assistant writes down every finding. The picture shows such a room: the stand with the glass tube, the cable running to the window, the van outside, Curie at the switch box and beside her the open register.
The other side
The legend is larger than the work and hides it. Curie did not invent the X-ray car, nor did she drive it herself in 1914; the names of her drivers are in her registers. She equipped 18 cars, not 200, and the name "petites Curie" for the cars was invented by her daughter Ève only in 1937, in her biography. The often-quoted 1.1 million X-ray examinations are Curie's estimate for the whole French medical service in 1917 and 1918; she herself examined 948 wounded men. The historian Natalie Pigeard-Micault of the Musée Curie writes that such glorification turns a model into an unattainable exception and slights the many others who did the same work.

What the sources leave open: Where Curie X-rayed on 1 November 1914 is not recorded; the room north of Paris and the grey day are a setting, as is her being alone: a car's crew included a doctor, a radiographer and a driver. The notebook of those weeks (BnF NAF 18480) is not described; the marbled cover follows the next volume, NAF 18481. The clothing is assumed. Her face follows the Nobel portrait of 1911.

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