The Logos Scripture · The Book of Marie Curie
The Book of Marie Curie 4 · Written by herself, from her autobiographical notes, her Nobel lecture, and her letters
Marie Sklodowska-Curie, born in Warsaw in 1867, died at Passy in France in 1934. Physicist and chemist. With her husband Pierre she found polonium and radium, and the word radioactivity is hers. She took the Nobel in physics in 1903 and in chemistry in 1911, and remains the only person to have taken one in each of two sciences. In the war she had X-ray machines fitted into vehicles, some twenty of them, and set up more than two hundred radiological rooms at the field hospitals; she drove to the front herself, and more than a million wounded men were examined by them (cf. 6.12 of this book). Written by herself: her doctoral thesis, the two-volume Treatise on Radioactivity, a life of her husband with an account of her own inside it, and a private journal kept for the year after his death, printed only after she was gone. She was raised in the faith; after her mother and her sister died young she did not believe again, and never returned to it. She married by civil rite and not by the rite of the church. No argument of hers closes on the will of God. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: work with the hands. There is a printer here (cf. The Book of Franklin) and a man who ran an institute (cf. The Book of Bohr), but no one who spent four years washing tons of ore residue himself. Some further things, set down neither dressed up nor puffed. One: she and her husband agreed to take out no patent, and they were poor at the time. Two: in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences refused her by two votes; she never stood again, never campaigned about it, and went back to work. Three: she died of aplastic anaemia from years of exposure; her notebooks are radioactive still, kept in lead, and whoever would read them signs first. One last thing, set down without praise: of all the volumes here, she alone was killed by what she found. She did not choose it and nobody forced it — no one then knew the stuff injures (4.11 of this book). Bruno knew and would not take it back, and the Order says so of him; this is not that, and the Order does not count it to her credit. It shows one thing only: whoever goes in first finds out for everyone after how deep the water is. Chapter 4 should be read with that fact held beside it.