First, there was the variety of the girls’ symptoms: surely they couldn’t all be traced to one source (diphtheria, angina and TB were among the recorded causes of death). The first legal suit against USRC was filed in September 1925, but when it came to getting justice the radium companies held all the trump cards. Death, when it came, was usually accompanied by violent haemorrhaging.
MRS. DONAHUE VICTIM OF RADIUM POISONING DIES SKIN
The girls’ breath became foul-smelling, and their skin so paper-thin it would split open if simply brushed by a fingernail. Very often their jawbones crumbled to the touch. Instead, agonising ulcers sprouted in the holes left behind. The dentist would remove the rotten teeth, already practically falling out of the girls’ mouths, but the gums wouldn’t heal. For many, like Mollie Maggia, it started with severe tooth decay. Others, like Albina Larice, produced stillborn babies. Some, like Marguerite Carlough and Hazel Vincent, suffered chronic exhaustion. There was no reason for them to think this was in any way sinister - rather the reverse: ‘Radium will put rosy cheeks on you’, they were told. One painted her teeth to impress her man. Some girls wore evening dresses to work so that they would glow on their dates. If the girls blew their noses, their handkerchiefs glowed they glowed like ghosts on their way home their clothes glowed from their wardrobes at night. They were also extremely well paid: up to three times what they might have earned in factories.Īnd then there was the glamour of working with radium. After Congress voted America into the war in the spring of 1917, most of the dials were for military use, so the girls had the satisfaction of knowing they were serving their country. They sat in rows, dipping fine camelhair brushes into a radium solution, then ‘pointed’ them between moistened lips before painting the numbers on the dials. But when radium-dial-painting ‘studios’ were set up in Newark, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, hordes of working-class girls, some as young as 14, applied for jobs painting luminous numerals on watchfaces. These treatments were strictly for the rich - gram for gram, radium was the most expensive substance on earth. Others took to drinking radium water, or visiting radium clinics and spas.
Some claimed it could restore vitality in the elderly. As she shared her discovery with scientists, and radium was found to be capable of destroying human tissue, it was enlisted in the battle against cancer - and not just cancer but fever, gout and constipation. She was in thrall to it: it stirred her, she wrote, with ‘ever-new emotion and enchantment’. ‘My beautiful radium’, Marie Curie called the element she discovered in 1898. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia - ‘Mollie’ - Maggia. Together, there is a recorded total of over forty clock factory workers who died from probable radium poisoning.Įxcerpt from Kate Moore's book, THE RADIUM GIRLS She was the first of the five 'Radium Girls' who banded together to sue US Radium. The radioactive material eventually built up in the bodies of the women and nearly all died of radiation poisoning. Grace and a number of the women she worked with became the first recorded American industrial poisoning incidents on modern safety records. To keep their paintbrushes well pointed, they would put the brush tip in their mouths.
These dials were painted with radioactive paint which the all-female painting staff hand painted. Grace Fryer worked in a factory that made the first watches with illuminated dials. Radium poisoning sometimes affected other areas of the body as well Unidentified man suffering from radium poisoning Donohue shows how girls often licked the brushes used to paint radium on the dials.this practice would make the brush tips more pointed and therefore their aim would be more accurate Side view photo of Grace Fryer (post mortem, above)įrom her hospital bed, Mrs. Photos above: Grace Fryer before and after radium poisoning (post mortem)
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