Marie Curie built a fleet of mobile X-ray vehicles and brought them to the front lines of World War I, helping battlefield surgeons locate bullets, shrapnel, and broken bones inside wounded soldiers. By war’s end, her radiological network had grown to include roughly 20 mobile units and hundreds of fixed installations across France, with estimates suggesting her work helped treat over a million wounded soldiers.
The Problem Curie Set Out to Solve
When World War I broke out in 1914, X-ray technology already existed in hospitals, but it was bulky, stationary, and nowhere near the front lines. Wounded soldiers had to be transported long distances to reach a facility with imaging equipment, and many didn’t survive the journey. Even those who did often faced surgeons operating blind, probing for shrapnel fragments or bullet lodged deep in tissue without any way to see exactly where they were. This meant longer surgeries, more tissue damage, higher infection rates, and more amputations.
Curie, already a two-time Nobel Prize winner, recognized that the solution wasn’t to move soldiers to the X-rays. It was to move the X-rays to the soldiers.
Inventing the “Petites Curies”
Curie designed what became known as the first “radiological car,” a vehicle outfitted with a portable X-ray machine and a photographic darkroom for developing images on site. One of the biggest engineering challenges was power. X-ray machines need electricity, and battlefield locations had none. Curie solved this by installing a dynamo, a type of electrical generator, that drew power from the car’s own petroleum engine. The vehicle could pull up near a field hospital, and within minutes surgeons had a working X-ray station.
Getting the first car built required its own battle. The French military was slow to provide funding, so Curie went around them. She approached the Union of Women of France, a philanthropic organization that gave her the money to produce the first vehicle. That car saw action at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, the major Allied victory that kept German forces from reaching Paris. After proving the concept worked, Curie leveraged her fame to persuade wealthy Parisian women to donate vehicles. She soon had 20 cars, all outfitted with X-ray equipment. Soldiers and medical staff nicknamed them “petites Curies,” or “little Curies.”
How the X-Rays Changed Battlefield Surgery
Before Curie’s units arrived, a surgeon trying to remove a piece of shrapnel from a soldier’s leg or chest was essentially guessing. Shrapnel from artillery shells splintered into irregular fragments that could lodge in unpredictable locations. A surgeon might spend a long time probing a wound, causing additional trauma, only to miss the fragment entirely. With an X-ray image, the surgeon could see exactly where the foreign object sat, how deep it was, and whether bone was fractured. Surgeries became faster, more precise, and far less destructive to surrounding tissue.
This mattered enormously for survival. Faster surgery meant less time under anesthesia, less blood loss, and a smaller wound for bacteria to colonize. In a war where infection killed almost as many soldiers as the injuries themselves, shaving even minutes off an operation could mean the difference between recovery and death.
Curie at the Front Lines
Curie didn’t simply design the vehicles and hand them off. She frequently drove to the front lines herself, operated the X-ray equipment, and examined wounded soldiers directly. This was dangerous, physically exhausting work. She was exposed repeatedly to radiation without any of the protective equipment that would later become standard, a choice that almost certainly contributed to the aplastic anemia that eventually killed her in 1934.
Her daughter Irène, just 17 when the war began, joined her. By age 18, Irène was running radiology units in mobile field hospitals independently, teaching nurses how to operate X-ray machines, and working on the Belgian front. Photographs from 1915 show both mother and daughter at the Hoogstade Hospital in Belgium, with radiographic equipment installed around them. By 1916, Irène was stationed at a radiology unit in Amiens and regularly climbing in and out of the radiological cars on her own assignments.
Building a Radiological Network Across France
The 20 mobile units were only the beginning. Curie recognized that the war’s scale demanded a much larger infrastructure. She worked to establish permanent and semi-permanent radiological stations at military hospitals behind the lines, creating a layered system: mobile cars handled emergencies close to the front, while fixed installations provided more thorough imaging at hospitals further back. By the end of 1918, France had more than 500 fixed and semi-fixed radiological units and about 300 mobile units operating across the country.
Curie couldn’t staff all of these herself. So she set up training courses, teaching women to operate X-ray equipment, develop radiographic images, and assist surgeons in interpreting the results. More than 150 radiological technicians completed her training program during the war. Many of these women had no prior scientific background. Curie’s courses gave them practical skills in anatomy, physics, and photographic development, enough to run a field radiology station competently. This was one of the first large-scale efforts to train women as medical technicians, and it created a workforce that kept the radiological network functioning even as the war dragged on.
The Scale of Her Impact
The total number of soldiers examined using Curie’s radiological network is estimated at over one million. That figure encompasses not just the mobile cars but the entire system she helped build: the fixed stations, the trained technicians, and the standardized procedures she put in place. Before her intervention, battlefield radiology in France was essentially nonexistent. By the armistice, it was a routine part of military medicine.
Curie received little official recognition during the war itself. The French military establishment was not always welcoming to a civilian woman, let alone one born in Poland, directing a medical operation on their battlefields. She pressed forward anyway, funding vehicles through private donations, training her own staff, and showing up at the front when the need was urgent. Her wartime work transformed how injuries were diagnosed and treated under combat conditions, and it laid the foundation for portable medical imaging that militaries and emergency responders still rely on today.