8. Marie Curie and Radium.

Physical medicine 
 x-rays, ultrasonics and tomography.

 Marie Curie and Radium.
 ======================
 Marie Curie born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw 1867.
 Her father was a physics teacher and her mother, who died of tuberculosis
 when Marie was ??, had been principal of a girl's high school.
 Poland was under Russian occupation and opportunities for higher education
 for Poles was difficult.
 As a school girl she was influenced by the French positivist Aguste Comte.
 Worked as a Governess to earn enough money to enable her brother to pay
 for his education in France and taught herself science from books,
 eventually following her brother to France.
 In 1891 entered the Sorbonne in Paris, but was desperately short of money,
 living extremely frugally and fainting sometimes from hunger.
 She graduated top of her class in 1894.
 In 1894 she met Pierre Curie ?? years her senior and the discoverer of the
 phenomenon of piezo-electricity, (the generation of an electric potential
 across a stressed crystal). They married in 1895, a civil ceremony as
 both were anti-clericals. Rather than buy wedding finery and rings they
 bought bicycles, which were becoming popular, and rode off on their
 honeymoon.

 Died in Haute Savoie France July 4 1934, of leucemia caused by exposure to
 radiation, the physical effects of which were not appreciated in time to
 save her.

 Physical medicine.
 =================
 X-rays.
 ======
 Ultrasonics.
 ===========
 Tomography.
 ==========
 In the last two decades medicine has been revoutionised by the development
 of computerised axial tomography scanning, or CAT scanning as it is known.
 A CAT scan of a patient enables you to see a cross-sectional x-ray image
 of a person just as if they had been cut in two! This is done by
 building up the 2-D image from a multitude of 1-D images.

References.
===========
 Eve Curie
 Marie Curie - a biography


Last updated 2nd November 1998




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