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Years
130 – Superwoman with x-ray vision
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling, Corporate Storytelling, Podcast
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Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’” Listen to hear how one woman persisted with her vision and changed the lives of over a million people.
Welcome back to another episode of Anecdotally Speaking! This week, Mark shares a historical story.
The story follows Marie Curie’s actions during World War One. Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. She is also the only person to win a Nobel prize in two different disciplines, physics and chemistry.
For your storybank
Tags: confidence, ideas, innovation, making a difference, persistence
This story starts at 01:10
World War One broke out in 1914, three years after Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize.
Curie thought about what she could do to help the war effort. She thought about the surgeons on the frontline and how they were performing surgery without the time or ability to take soldiers to one of the few hospitals in France with x-ray machines. So she invented the petite Curie—a van fitted with a portable x-ray machine.
Curie approached the French military, seeking funding for her invention, but they refused her. She then approached the Union of Women of France and was successful. Curie built her first petite Curie, and it worked. She sought further funding from wealthy women in Paris and built twenty petite Curies.
Those twenty petite Curies went to the frontline and allowed tens of thousands of soldiers to receive x-rays. Curie had her own, which she operated on the frontline, and women she had trained ran the others.
Curie also oversaw the installation of 200 x-ray machines at field hospitals—semi-permanent hospitals near the frontline. Because of her efforts, over a million soldiers were x-rayed during WWI, completely changing their lives for the better.
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