The Marie Curie-Sklodowska Institute in Warsaw, in 1945 and 1947, Reconstruction
Polish science and medicine, Reconstruction, Warsaw
Marie Curie, with friends family, and governmental support, was able to set up the Radium Institute in Warsaw. "A prominent group of American women, close friends of Madame Curie and devoted to the cause of America's fight against cancer, donated one gram of radium to the Institute. Thus Poland was able to take up her own large-scale fight against scourge of this mankind." The Institute was a hospital, lab, and library, but was closed and then partially destroyed during the war. The hospital continued operating until August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising. The Gestapo sought the radium that was hidden in the building, (1 gram hidden, 720 mg was handed over to the Germans). After the Warsaw Uprising, the Germans destroyed the building, killed the staff and patients (or moved them to Concentration Camps) and moved expensive equipment like X-rays back to Germany. The director was able to bribe a few German soldiers and rescue the radium amidst the ruins. After the war, the statue of Marie-Curie, like that of Copernicus, was left intact underneath the rubble. The Institute was restored with the aid of UNRRA resources. The photograph on the left was taken in 1945, the image on the right was taken in 1947.
Alex Chen
Poland of Today, April, 1947 Issue. p. 12-13.
1932-1947
Photograph
Marie Curie
Polish Science and Medicine
Marie Curie was a famed Polish-born, French-naturalized scientist who studied radiology and was awarded two Nobel Prizes for her work on radium and for the discovery of two elements, radium and polonium (named after Poland). She contributed, and indeed drove them into the battlefield, to the use of mobile X-ray units during WWI, establishing the importance of X-ray use in medicine. She later founded an institute of radiation in Warsaw, which was destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt by 1947.
Alex Chen
Public Domain Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maria_Sk%C5%82odowska-Curie#/media/File:Mariecurie.jpg
1867 - 1934
Public Domain
Photograph
Patient being x-rayed with portable x-ray while Dr. A. Powell Davies looks on
Polish Medical Mission
X-ray had become such a critical piece of equipment since WWI that it was one of the first pieces of equipment that needed to be imported to the hospital. Just a few decades earlier, Röntgen rays (X-ray) was discovered in 1895, and the phenomenon became quickly utilized to create diagnostic instrumentation, especially useful for lung and bone conditions, two parts of of the body that is particularly important for miners.
Alex Chen
Work 19. USCA, Audiovisual Records, Photographs, 1941-1986, bMS 16181/5 (7) , Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard University
1947
Andover-Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Archives
Photograph