"ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SCIENTISTS THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN": FIRST EDITION OF MME. CURIE'S CLASSIC WORK ON RADIOACTIVITY

CURIE, Madame P[ierre]. Traité de Radioactivité. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1910. Two volumes. Octavo, contemporary marbled boards and endpapers rebacked to style in green morocco gilt, raised bands.

First edition of Mme Curie's classic work on radioactivity, published seven years after she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for physics and one year before she was awarded a second Nobel prize. An exceptional copy with a distinguished provenance.

"Marie Curie is one of the most famous scientists the world has ever known…. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, for physics, which she and her husband Pierre shared with Henri Becquerel in 1903 for their studies of the nature of radioactivity" (Curie, Madame Curie, ix). Seven years later Mme. Curie published Traité, which is her fullest statement on radioactivity—a word she created for a concept she invented and defined. In addition to providing a detailed review of discoveries during an extremely fruitful decade of work, "Curie's treatise on radioactivity admitted, without reservations, the theory of transformations… By its nature the phenomenon of radioactivity substantiated the connection between matter and electricity" (DSB). One year after the publication of Traité, "Curie became the first scientist, male or female, to be awarded a second Nobel prize, this time in chemistry, for the isolation of the elements radium and polonium, this time hers alone to claim" (Madame Curie, ix). Containing frontispiece portrait of Pierre Curie (I), seven plates, and 193 in-text diagrams. Text in French. With laid-in leaf of publisher's advertisement. See PMM 394. Each volume with owner signatures on the half title of S. Ratner, most probably award-winning American biochemist Sara Ratner who, in 1974, became one of the few women elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Ratner, who faced daunting gender discrimination in the 1930s, found work with Rudolf Schoenheimer before she became a professor at NYU School of Medicine, and later joined the Department of Biochemistry at the Public Health Research Institute of New York. For her contributions to biochemistry, she was awarded the Carl Neuberg Medal in 1959, the Garvan Medal in 1961, and the 1975 New York Academy of Sciences Freedman Award in Biochemistry. From the library of Dr. B. Leonard Holman, a pioneer in nuclear medicine who was named a professor of radiology at Harvard in 1982, became chair of radiology at the Brigham and Harvard department in 1986, and in 1988 was named the Philip H. Cook Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School.

Text fine, light restoration to marbled boards.