ABSTRACT
Only a year aer the discovery of radioactivity in 1895 by Henri Becquerel, radium was discovered as a new radioactive element by Madame Curie. Soon it was realized that radium had a tremendous therapeutic potential in treating many proliferative diseases including cancer. First successful clinical results were reported in the rst decade of the twentieth century for treating gynecological cancers. One of the advantages of radium in treating aggressive cancers was that it emitted a spectrum of radiations that included some high-energy photons. is allowed a high-dose irradiation of the central area of a target volume while still providing a signicant dose to distant points several centimeters away such as the pelvic walls in treating cervical cancers. Radium ushered in a new era of medicine, which started to oer life-saving treatments to patients with untreatable diseases. For many decades, radium and encapsulated radon seeds (encapsulated sources lled with radon gas collected from radium salts) oered this new treatment modality called brachytherapy to hundreds of thousands of cancer patients. As late as 1980s, radium was still a treatment of choice for selected cancers as noted in many standard textbooks on radiation therapy.
