France (born in Poland)
Marie Curie
1867–1934 Physicist; creator of mobile X-ray units
Marie Curie, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911, gave her energies to the war effort in 1914. She organized, funded and learned to drive cars equipped with X-ray equipment, which came to be called the petites Curies, and equipped some 200 fixed radiological rooms in French and Belgian hospitals. With her teenage daughter Irène she trained about 150 women in radiography. The X-ray images allowed surgeons to locate bullets and shrapnel and saved many limbs and lives. Curie died of aplastic anemia in 1934, probably caused by years of radiation exposure.