![]() ![]() Deborah Blum touches on the radium girls’ story in her 2011 book “The Poisoner’s Handbook,” and in follow-up articles in PLoS Blogs and Wired. Moore’s book is a colorful complement to Claudia Clark’s pioneering “Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935,” published in 1997, which chronicles the women’s fight as it led into the larger industrial health movement. Workers at Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, began falling ill in the 1930s. Yet for as long as they could, these companies dodged and denied, concealed and covered up. Radium Corporation and inventor of the paint used in the dial factories, sawed off the tip of his own finger when he realized it had become poisoned with radium. Moore catalogs damning evidence that the higher-ups knew better. Over and over, their supervisors told them no, it was safe - healthy, even. Many were hesitant, asking whether the radium could harm them. ![]() To paint the watch dials, the young women were taught to form the bristles of their fine paintbrushes into a sharp point by moistening them in their mouths. It was a cure-all for well-to-do patients and a tonic for the healthy, who consumed radium in pills, creams, ointments, toothpaste, lipstick - even radium-infused jockstraps. By the early 1900s, when these two companies opened up shop, and throughout the Roaring Twenties, a radium frenzy seized the world’s imagination. When Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium at the turn of the century, it was hailed as a miracle substance for its effectiveness in treating some cancers and tumors. Their bodies glowed like ghosts, even after many washings, sometimes for years. The radium powder that made their paint luminous, allowing the watch faces and hands to glow in the dark, was expensive it made them feel glamorous to have a coat of it dusting their hair, skin, and clothing after a day’s work. The girls found their jobs - hand-painting watch dials for the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in northern New Jersey, and the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois - to be artistic, technically challenging, and economically empowering. Many were daughters and granddaughters of immigrants who had come to America in search of work. In a new book, “The Radium Girls,” the British author Kate Moore tells the story of dozens of young women like Mollie Maggia. By fall, the disease spread to her jugular vein, causing her to hemorrhage violently and die in agony. He gently prodded it, and to his shock the entire jawbone broke off in his hand. On this day in May, she told him her jaw had been aching more than usual. Knef, an expert on mouth diseases, had never seen anything like it. BOOK REVIEW - “The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women,” by Kate Moore ![]()
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