Who were Douglas Macmillan and Marie Curie?

Posted in: History Lesson 10th October 2022

 

Douglas Macmillan and Marie Curie - a look at the people behind the organisations.

 

Like many of you we have just had our Macmillan coffee morning. Or maybe you’re planning a Blooming Great Tea Party for Marie Curie? We’ve all been to one or taken part in one haven’t we? Both hugely worthwhile causes that the pharmaceutical industry gets behind every year. Macmillan and Curie are always on display at some point in the year at your local chemist shop.

£213 raised at our Macmillan coffee morning

At the time of writing we raised a highly creditable £213 which involved all of our staff eating a great deal of cake (the things we do, honestly!).

Macmillan Cancer Support and Marie Curie have become part of the national fabric of life.

Two names synonymous with caring and compassion with both offering (in differing ways) support and help to cancer sufferers when they need it most.

Both of these iconic ‘brands’ have no equal. Just the utterance of the words leaves you with a feeling of public duty, care and selflessness. They are known universally as forces for good.

Both charities are hugely famous but many people have no idea of their beginnings or their long history, so I thought we could take a brief look at both of them for this week’s blog article, something that may be of interest to our huge army of customers within the pharmaceutical industry but may also be of interest to anyone who may stumble across it.

So. Who exactly was Douglas Macmillan and Marie Curie and how does their name link to the charities?

 

Macmillan Cancer Support (Formerly the Society for the prevention and Relief of Cancer).

Douglas Macmillan was a civil servant who lived in London. In his spare time he had taken an interest in the causes and outcomes of cancer and went as far as writing a book about the subject ‘In Cancer’s Clutch’. He had some views and opinions on the causes and treatments of cancer (very little of which would stand up to much scrutiny today I might add) but everything changed in 1911 with the death of his father.

His father died from Cancer and this event had a profound effect on the young Douglas. He had witnessed first-hand the hopelessness of his father’s condition and also the lack of support and care he was given. Very little was known about cancer and even less, it seems, was known about caring for people with the disease.

Just before his death Douglas’s father had given him £10 (adjusted for inflation* that’s around £1,200 in today’s money – so a decent sum). Upon his death Douglas used that money to found the ‘Society for the prevention and relief of Cancer’.

The society had a rocky start in life. It would be 19 years before they recruited their first full-time member of staff and many in the medical profession were wary of the society’s anti-vivisection and vegetarian views. Membership (and therefore, income) rose throughout the 1930’s. Their welfare work began to be noticed throughout the county and the phrase ‘giving to cancer relief’ took hold. It was Macmillan’s charity that they were talking about. He gave up running the charity in 1966, three years before succumbing to cancer himself.

What a shame that Douglas Macmillan didn’t see the full fruition of his work. It is now one of the largest British charities (revenue was £230m in 2021) and they provide specialist healthcare, information and financial support to people (and their relatives) affected by cancer.

 

Marie Curie.

Unlike Macmillan, Marie Curie didn’t set out to help cancer patients, but in the event, she did.

Marie Curie discovered polonium* and radium and was a trailblazer in the field of chemistry and physics, so when she was asked to lend her name to a new hospital offering radiological treatment to female cancer sufferers in 1929, she immediately accepted. It was that hospital which bloomed into the huge and much loved organisation that is so well known today (the building itself was largely flattened in the Second World War but thankfully the organisation emerged stronger from its rubbles).

Marie Curie was born in Poland in 1867 (then part of the Russian Empire) and was educated secretly as higher education for women was banned.  She went on to study in Paris and then on to a glittering career with pioneering research carried out into radioactivity and the discovery of polonium and radium.

In 1895 she married renowned French physicist Pierre Currie and between them they changed the world. Marie Curie was the first woman to ever receive a Nobel Prize*, the first woman (and remains the only woman) to have received two Nobel Prizes and the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes in different fields (for physics and chemistry). Alas their union was only to last for 11 years. Pierre was known to get lost in his thoughts and would often drift away whilst thinking about something. It is thought this is how he wandered into the path of a stage coach on a Parisian street in 1906, killing him instantly.

Marie Curie coined the phrase ‘radioactivity’ and is credited with saving a million lives during the First World War. She used (and trained others to use) x-ray equipment which allowed shrapnel and bullets to be removed from the bodies of wounded soldiers, not to mention the countless fractures that must have been discovered.

Of course radiation has its own risks and its effect on the human body was not fully understood and certainly not understood by Curie who often used to carry around polonium and radium in her coat pocket (it is said that she was fascinated by the dancing light in the tube, she even kept one of the tubes on her bedside table to act as a light). It is certain that her death, from Aplastic Anemia in 1934 was due to the high doses of radioactivity that she was exposed to. (A 1938 Act of Parliament finally outlawed radioactive products for use by the public, it was even showing up in products such as toothpaste.)

Fans of hers who might like to look at her old notebooks need to sign a waiver and are advised to wear protective clothing whilst looking at them. They are expected to be highly radioactive for the next fifteen hundred years.

Two names and two hugely differing stories but both are united in supporting and changing the lives of millions of cancer sufferers in the UK through the much loved organisations which bear their name.

 *Pierre was offered the Nobel Prize but would only accept the prize if it was shared with his wife. The nomination committee refused to offer it to a woman but they eventually relented making Marie Curie the award’s first female recipient.

*Marie Curie named Polonium after Poland, the country of her birth.

*£10 adjusted for inflation. Inflation (being the hot topic of the day) has an interesting footnote during this time. If you had £10 in 1800 and adjusted it for inflation by the time you got to 1916 it was still £10. The buying power of that note didn’t decrease, overall, in 116 years. This isn’t because no inflation happened for over a hundred years, it’s because for many years deflation balanced it out. One year there would be 8% inflation, the next 8% deflation. One of the reasons for deflation is increased productivity (Luddites/Industrial revolution anyone?) – Prices actually go down and the spending power of money goes up. So, given the ups and downs, £10 retained its value for 116 years. That same £10 in 1916, left in your bottom draw until today wouldn’t do quite so well. £10 in 2022 would buy only 1.034% in goods than its 1916 counterpart.