The Radium Girls - 03/27/21

 Hello Bright People, 

Book 17: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women (5/10)

Premise: Factory workers in the early 1900's work with Radium not knowing it's dangers, and the legal and medical ramifications. 

It is almost impossible to get Radium in 2021. At least according to 5 minutes of Googling. You can get an old watch hand that was painted with radium but that's basically it unless you are working in the science or medical fields. However in the early 1900's after the Curies' discovered the element there was a huge craze for this radioactive element. People would use it as lotion, consume it, and as is the focus of this story, use it to make watch faces and dials glow. 

Radium girls would use a paint brush to use a mixture of radium and other components to make the 'paint' for the watch faces. However these paint brushes would start to splay so the girls would lick them to get them to a sharp point again. "Lip, dip, paint" as author Kate Moore puts it. Predictably after a while ingesting and sometimes wearing radioactive elements has detrimental health effects. 

Many of the Radium girls had teeth pulled, their bones, especially their jaws became porous and easily broke. Unfortunately even after they stopped working in the factory it continued to affect them. Radium poisoning takes years to start having detrimental effects. So the girls banded together to hold the companies responsible. It was an uphill battle the entire time and had different outcomes for different girls over this period. However with the battles medical and legal, they helped make the world a safer place for those after them. 

Now this story is very interesting, but Moore's way of the story makes me feel like she wishes she was writing a YA novel instead of non-fiction. She often says what the people are feeling, or how she imagines they feel. This takes the sting out of how awful radium poisoning actually is. Having your body being eaten from the inside out, with radium remaining even after death, evidently causing the bones to glow. 

So avoid contact with radioactive elements, 

and remember dear readers, Stay Vivid.