Louis-Frederic Wickham (1861-1913): father of radium therapy

Louis-Frederic Wickham and Paul-Marie Degrais, both radium martyrs, co-authored in 1909 the first textbook written exclusively for radium therapy. This was distinct from earlier textbooks on radiation therapy which relegated radium therapy to a few pages at the end of the book with the remainder devoted to the applications of X-rays. By 1906 when he became the director of the Laboratoire Biologique du Radium, the world's first Radium Institute, which was sited in the rue Artois, Paris, he was already a well known dermatologist and syphilologist working first at the Hospital Saint-Louis and later at the Hopital Saint-Lazare. The organisation of his Laboratoire, which was funded by the industrialist Armet de Lisle, was used as a model for many of the first radium institutes in Europe and America. After his premature death in 1913 and the upheaval of the 1914-1918 World War, Marie Curie's Institut du Radium opened in 1919. The contributions of Louis Wickham to the science and organisation of radium therapy were then overshadowed by the later achievements of the Institut du Radium in the me d'Ulm/rue Pierre et Marie Curie. This biography describes the life and work of this remarkable physician who was selected by King George V of Great Britain as a Member of the Royal Victorian Order and was decorated in France as a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur Information is also included about some of Louis Wickham's famous colleagues; Paul Degrais, Henri Dominici and Paul Oudin, as well as his son, Yves-Louis Wickham, a radio therapist at the Institut Gustave Roussy. A complete bibliography is added. (authors)