Marie Curie
Of course, this list wouldn’t be complete without Marie Curie. The noted chemist and inventor discovered radium and polonium along with her husband Pierre in the late 1800s, but she also transformed combat medicine forever when she created the first mobile radiology machine. Similar to the X-ray machines that were cropping up in major cities’ hospitals, Curie’s car-sized devices could be used by army surgeons on the battlefield to quickly image any bullets or shrapnel trapped inside their patients.
While her device might have saved countless folks on the battlefield, it might have ultimately ended up killing her—her excessive exposure to X-rays later in life is widely accepted as being one of the core causes behind the case of aplastic anemia she developed that ended up killing her on June 4th, 1934.
