![]() The links below will direct you to the catalog record or finding aid of the resource listed. Other resources include photographs, a scrapbook on Marie Curie, medical trade ephemera, and numerous books dealing with radium treatments and the development of radium-related cancer. As a “radium hound,” Hartman had firsthand experiences of dealing with and careful handling of radium in the early 20 th century. Hartman, a radium specialist and consultant, spent most of his life inspecting, selling, consulting, or hunting down and returning radium. The Historical Medical Library holds a variety of resources on radium, including the Frank Hartman papers. By the 1940s and 50s, however, the practice of using radium as a medical treatment had been reduced to very few applications due to its high price, small quantity, and the dangers of handling radium. Patients would drink from the container throughout the day to cure their ailments. These products ranged from additives in toothpaste to “Revigator,” which was water with radium dissolved into it. ![]() With little to no regulation of radium and other treatments in the early 20th century, ambitious medical doctors and salesmen looked to make products using radium to cure many ailments. After the discovery, radium was used to cure many ailments. ![]() Marie and Pierre Curie found radium in a sample of uraninite in 1898. Marie would marry Pierre Curie, also a French Physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Marie Curie was a Polish-born and French-naturalized physicist and chemist, as well as the first woman in history to win the Nobel Prize, and the only woman to win twice. Only two years after Becquerel’s breakthrough, Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, discovered radium. Becquerel would take Marie Curie under his tutelage as a doctoral student where they pursued the discovery of radium and other radioactive minerals. After the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 by French physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Antoine Henri Becquerel, many other scientists began to search for uses of radioactivity. ![]() From the Frank Hartman papers, MSS 2/340.Įarly in the 20th century there was a medical practice that revolved around a new treatment involving the radioactive material called radium. Pierre and Marie could then measure the new phenomenon precisely, and they gave it a name-radioactivity.Marie Curie and her husband and lab partner, Pierre. As these rays passed through air they created small electrical charges that Marie was able to counterbalance with charges from weighted quartz. It proved useful following an accidental discovery by physicist Henri Becquerel, who noticed that uranium salts fogged a photographic plate, as if emitting invisible rays. Pierre and his brother had discovered that when certain crystals were distorted they developed an electric charge-the piezoelectric effect that would one day make quartz watches possible. Unable to get a higher education in her native country, she studied in Paris and met fellow scientist Pierre Curie, whom she married in 1895. She was born Maria Sklodowska in Russian-controlled Poland in 1867. Both were connected with the element radium that she discovered. Marie Curie holds a special place in Nobel Prize history-not only the first woman to win the prize, but also one of very few people to have been awarded a second. ‘The Most Mysterious Substance in Nature’ (1903) by Alfred Hugh Fisher.
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