Book Excerpt: Miracles In Medicine Sheds Light On Innovations From Across Ages

Can you imagine a world where surgeries and amputations were conducted without anaesthesia? OUCH! Or one in which disease was believed to be caused by ‘stinky air’? WEIRD! Or a world where treating madness involved drilling a hole through the skull to release the supposed ‘demons’ inside your head? Guess what? That was our world, just about 250 years ago! All of this began to change in the eighteenth century with the coming of modern medicine. This brave new science, full of brilliant breakthroughs, was built on the hard work, dedication and persistence of thousands of curious minds across the ages, from Arabia to China and India to Europe.

Packed with fascinating stories, insights and illustrations, Miracles In Medicine is a celebration of 2,500 years of human endeavour and innovation in the medical sciences. Read it and raise a rousing cheer to the amazing people who gave their all to unravel the secrets of the natural world and the human body, so that we could live longer, healthier and happier lives.

Previously published as From Leeches to Slug Glue: 25 Explosive Ideas that Made (and Are Making) Modern Medicine, this new edition, with an all-new cover, has been made more compact textually and refreshed to be more reader-friendly visually.

Here's an excerpt from Miracles In Medicine by Roopa Pai

The great Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (in Physics, in 1903) and the only person in history to win two Nobel Prizes in two different scientific disciplines (she won again in 1911, in Chemistry), will need more than one chapter to herself if we are to do justice. 

In this book, however, we are only focusing on a tiny – but very significant – part of her achievements. This is a lovely story, because it says as much about her as a person as it does about her as a scientist.

By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, Marie Curie was already a double Nobel Prize winner. Earlier that year, she had been hard at work on the Radium Institute at the University of Paris, which was scheduled to open its doors in August 1914, on a street that was to be named Rue Pierre Curie after her beloved late husband. But war arrived, several researchers were drafted into the French army and the forty-seven-year-old Marie found herself at a loose end. Wasting no time, she threw herself into the war effort for her adopted country.

First, she tried to donate her gold Nobel Prize medals to the war fund, but the French National Bank sensibly refused to accept them. Disappointed, she used her prize money to buy war bonds instead. (In times of war, governments need a lot of money quickly. They raise it from their citizens, who ‘loan’ money to the government by buying war bonds.) Then, she began to cast about for a real problem that she could sink her teeth into, and found one when she realized that the lives of many more wounded soldiers could be saved if they could be X-rayed as quickly as possible after they fell, to help doctors decide on the best course of treatment. Unfortunately, very few (battle)field hospitals had radiography units (i.e., the equipment needed to take X-rays) and the ones that did were often too far away to be of much help to most of the wounded. If only there was a way to take the radiography unit to the soldiers, instead of the other way around!

Not one to let the grass grow under her feet, and definitely not one to be intimidated by a subject she knew nothing about, Marie read up everything she could about radiology, anatomy, and automobiles. She then procured X-ray equipment and portable generators for electricity, and fitted out twenty suitable vehicles to function as mobile radiography units. As the newly appointed director of the Red Cross Radiology Service, she also set up France’s first military radiology centre, apart from radiography units at 200 field hospitals, all of which were in operation by late 1914. Then, recruiting her own seventeen-year-old daughter Irene as her assistant (Irene would go on to win her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935), she teamed up with a military doctor to start operations.

The sight of Marie Curie and her petites Curies (‘little Curies’) – the affectionate nickname given to the mobile radiology units – zigzagging across the battlefield in the aftermath of each battle, X-raying the wounded where they lay so that doctors could begin treating them immediately, cheered many a soldier, and won the hearts of all Frenchmen and women. It also saved scores of lives. Sadly, after the war ended in 1918, the French government did not acknowledge her very significant contributions in this field.

An interesting endnote: Marie Curie is best known for her discovery of two radioactive elements, radium (which she named after the Latin word for ‘ray’) and polonium (which she named for her native country). She spent so much of her life exposed to the dangerous radiation from these two elements (apart from exposure to X-ray radiation during the war) that if you want to see her diaries – or even her cookbook – today, you have to put on protective gear to shield yourself from radiation contamination. When she died in 1934, she was buried in no ordinary coffin – it was lined with a very special material. Can you guess what it was? That’s right, lead!

Extracted with permission from Miracles In Medicine by Roopa Pai; published by Hachette India