Radium Poisoning

Before you read this, a quick trigger warning. Radiation poisoning can be quite gruesome and it has a disturbing history, so please take care of yourself and be aware that there will be discussion about signs of radium poisoning.

Otherwise, please enjoy!

    The thing about radium that makes it so interesting is that it tricks the body into thinking it's something important. Now, the problem is that something is a thing that should be in your body for a very long time - namely, calcium. Exposure to radium in any form is bad enough, but when it sneaks into your digestive system and hides away in your bones...you've got problems. These include commonly known things like cancer, from the radiation attacking unprotected flesh, but can also include brittle or disappearing bones, rotting flesh, wounds that don't heal, and more. 

    You have heard about radium poisoning from the stories of the girls who painted glowing watch dials in the early 1900s, known as the radium girls. Glowing watches became even more popular during World War II, causing more and more young women to apply for a job that was considered glamorous at the time. At night, they would walk home covered head to toe in gently glowing radium dust. In the studios where they painted watches, they were instructed to lick camel-hair paintbrushes to a fine tip, dip them in the glowing paint, paint, and repeat. It was the only way to get the brushes to a fine enough tip to pain the tiny watch faces, but it would come with a heavy price. Despite the fact that the dangers of radium poisoning were known to scientists since 1901, girls were instructed to lick paintbrushes with radium paint on them until the late 1970s or early 1980s. They were also often underage because watch-painting was a very fashionable and desirable job at the time.

    There are many cases of women whose jawbones vanished or fell off while they were still alive due to the radium infiltrating their bones, replacing calcium and reducing structural integrity, and attacking the surrounding tissue with radiation. It's a sinister mechanism. In the beginning, radium poisoning will cause an increase in blood cell counts, making you appear even healthier than you were before. Later, those counts drop drastically as your bone becomes brittle and overall calcium levels fall. Radium poisoning can affect any part of the body and cause all the problems I mentioned and more, but the Radium Girls were told that it was good for them to be exposed to this element day in and day out for years and years. It would cure any ailment, make you more beautiful, boost your health...little did the public know. To add on to this problem, radiation poisoning often went unnoticed until years after the women had moved on from painting watches, often leaving the companies they worked for unaccountable in the eyes of the law despite the fact that the companies were aware of the dangers of radium.

    While this story isn't a happy one, it did spark change and justice for some of the radium girls. They fought many battles in court, and in one case, one woman brought fragments of her jawbone in, which were later used as evidence. These women were fighting legal battles as they were dying - radiation poisoning takes no prisoners. They weren't sure that everyone would survive to see the outcome of the case, but they fought anyway, through the truly horrifying problems that radiation brings.

Wikipedia link for radiation poisoning: Acute Radiation Syndrome 

Wikipedia link for the Radium Girls: Radium Girls 

Image credits: thoughtco.com

This post was inspired by the book "The Radium Girls: The Dark History of America's Shining Women" by Kate Moore. I really enjoyed the read and would definitely recommend it.