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Looking at Myself Dead
A story about science, fatherhood, discovery, and what it means to understand your mortality
Mortars and mustard gas rain down all along the western front between Germany and France. Bits of shrapnel rip limbs free from bodies. Men are dying miserable deaths, and battlefield doctors are stuck guessing where to operate, often guessing wrong and killing or further maiming their patients.
It’s 1915, and the war that did not, in fact, end all wars is in full swing.
Just behind the front lines, close enough to still be in danger of dying from a poorly targeted artillery strike, a wealthy widow and her teenage daughter are working a miracle of battlefield medicine. The widow is one of France’s most famous citizens.
Two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and her daughter Irene operate a mobile X-ray laboratory, which the French lovingly call a petite Curie. It’s part of a fleet of such vehicles that Curie is responsible for funding and organizing.
You may have learned in school that the X-ray was invented by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. That’s true.
But what you probably didn’t learn was that his discovery was enhanced by Marie Curie’s experiments with radium, and that Curie revolutionized medicine, first on the battlefield and…
