Biography | Marie Curie — The Sanatorium on the Plateau d'Assy

People look for a Paris deathbed near the Radium Institute.

She died in the mountains, in a concrete sanatorium built three years earlier.

Sancellemoz opened in August 1931 on the Plateau d'Assy in Passy, Haute-Savoie, at about 1,050 metres, facing the Mont Blanc massif. Paul-Louis Dubuisson designed the seven-storey reinforced-concrete block with a roof terrace used as a solarium.

On 4 July 1934 Marie Skłodowska Curie died here, aged 66. The cause recorded in the standard medical accounts is aplastic anaemia, a failure of the bone marrow to make enough blood cells.

The likely source was years of exposure: the untreated residues in the Lhomond shed, radium tubes carried in pockets and desk drawers, and the mobile X-ray units she organised for field hospitals in the First World War.

The building later became a rehabilitation centre. Patient care on this site ended in 2021, when remaining services moved to Cluses. The address is now 150 promenade Marie Curie.

This is not a museum room. It is a closed medical block on a plateau that once held a string of tuberculosis sanatoriums. The church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce stands nearby. Visitors should treat the site as private medical architecture, not a shrine inside the wards.

She was first buried at Sceaux, beside Pierre. The Panthéon transfer is a separate memory.

Photo: exterior views of Sancellemoz from the plateau are on Wikimedia Commons under CC licences. Portrait: Henri Manuel, c. 1920, public domain.