Therapy with Radioactive Elements

Abstract

In 1896 the Frenchman Becquerel discovered that the element uranium emitted a radiation which, like the recently discovered X-rays, was capable of penetrating matter and of exerting an effect on photographic emulsion. His discovery gave impetus to the research carried out by the Curies, Madame Marya Sklodowska Curie, Polish by birth, and her husband the physicist Pierre Curie, who succeeded in isolating from several tons of uranium ore a few milligrams of a very strongly radiating element, radium, and in determining the atomic weight of this element. Radium long played the major part in the study of natural radioactivity, and is still regarded as the prototype of radioactive elements and used in radio-therapy.