At school, I was taught that Marie Curie was French. Now, whilst she was married to a Frenchman, and may have acquired French citizenship later in life, by birth, she was Polish!
Were other people taught the half-truth that she was French?
@Paulos_the_fog That is nice to see, but the web tells a loud and different story, doesn’t it?
I think language and nationality have a lot to answer for.
Prof Roy Taylor did absolutely ground-breaking work on the causes and potential cure of Type II Diabetes however, no one over here in Luxembourg has ever even heard of him.
My brother was a consultant physician in the NHS whose remit included dealing with patients admitted with the complications of T2 diabetes (he's retired now). When an item about Prof Taylor's work appeared on a news roundup on TV, including before and after MRI scans, my brother rang to say how staggered he was to see the MRIs which of course he was capable of reading with an expert eye. However, even I could see the difference in the MRIs as it was pretty obvious!
Of course his work was published but in English and most doctors here in Luxembourg tend to be orientated towards the French or German language publications.
I suspect quite a few lives and a lot of suffering and blindness could be avoided if his work was better known over here and of course Prof Taylor put all his discoveries into the public domain.
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/magres/research/diabetes/reversal/#publicinformation
One thing that I do find extremely distasteful was that a number of US doctors jumped on the bandwagon and were offering Prof Taylors treatment regime for quite large sums of money as if they themselves had discovered it!
@Paulos_the_fog yup, that's what they taught me too. she studied in sorbonne and etc. poor teachers.
@Paulos_the_fog I’m pretty sure I knew that she named Polonium for her mother country. If it said it in the Ladybird book on Madame Curie I would have known it.
@Paulos_the_fog I was born in Poland, so we learned she was Polish (didn’t actyally know about the French part until later). But…. at the time she was not allowed to study in Poland, so all the research leading to the Nobel prices was done in France.
@Paulos_the_fog That’s about as bad as the anglo-centric view that the first computer was the ENIAC—completely neglecting Konrad Zuse and his work, isn’t it? ;-)