The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.Įxtracted from Radium Girls by Kate MooreĪuthor Kate Moore from Northampton says that we can all learn from the courage of the radium girls
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Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving.īut if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing-the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women's jaws and teeth.Īs early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger.Įssentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls' bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Thus radium 'if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.' 'As long as that instinct is present, a story like that of the radium girls is, unfortunately, all too likely to repeat.ĭoctors investigating the cases of radium poisoning among the factory workers noted that it had a 'similar chemical nature' to calcium. 'I worry about the continued commercial instinct of prioritising profits over people.,' she told Femail. It details how a brave group of women fought back and finally secured compensation, but now Kate strikes a cautionary note about how quickly their stories have faded from memory. Kate's book The Raidum Girls tells many of their individual stories, based on unpublished diaries, letters and interviews, for the first time, and it was recently recommended by Emma Watson for her Our Shared Shelf book club. Hundreds of women later died horrifically painful deaths from radium poisoning, leaving working class families destitute from paying for their medical bills - while their employers continually denied that their work was to blame. Kate Moore from Northampton chronicled the story of the American factory workers who painted illuminated dials on military equipment during the First World War and later on watches, using radium-enriched paint that glowed in the dark. An author who revealed the untold story of the 'radium girls' of the 1920s for the first time has warned that the tragedy of their deaths is more relevant than ever in today's world, and could even happen again.
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