The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials – watch dials and hands with self-luminous paint. The incidents occurred at three factories in United States: one in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s; and one in Waterbury, Connecticut, also in the 1920s.
After being told that the paint was harmless, the women in each facility ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to “point” their brushes on their lips in order to give them a fine tip; some also painted their fingernails, faces, and teeth with the glowing substance. The women were instructed to point their brushes in this way because using rags or a water rinse caused them to use more time and material, as the paint was made from powdered radium, zinc sulfide (a phosphor), gum arabic, and water.
Five of the women in New Jersey challenged their employer in a case over the right of individual workers who contract occupational diseases to sue their employers under New Jersey’s occupational injuries law, which at the time had a two-year statute of limitations, but settled out of court in 1928. Five women in Illinois who were employees of the Radium Dial Company (which was unaffiliated with the United States Radium Corporation) sued their employer under Illinois law, winning damages in 1938.
Here is the sad story of one of the Radium Girls.
Today’s Excruciating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Hazel Vincent was still being treated for pyorrhea and still having teeth extracted; they were like old friends dying off, one by one, until her own mouth felt like a stranger. By now, she could no longer work, as the pain was unbearable.
For her friends and family, it was intolerable to watch. For her boyfriend Theo in particular, who had loved her since they were teenagers, he felt like he was feeling his future disintegrate in his arms. He begged her to let him pay for the doctors and the dentist that she went to, but she was unwilling to accept money from him.
He wasn’t going to stand for that. This was the woman he loved. If she wouldn’t accept help from him as her boyfriend—would she accept it if she was his wife? And so, even though Hazel was very ill, he married her, because he believed that if she was his wife he would be more able to take care of her. They stood before the altar together, and he promised to love her, in sickness and in health.
As January, 1924 drew to a close, Theo and Hazel Kuser decided that they would look elsewhere for treatment. New Jersey was just a short distance from New York City, where some of the best doctors and dentists in the world had their practices. On January 25, Hazel, bravely swallowing down her pain, made the journey into the Big Apple for treatment at the office of Dr. Theodore Blum.
Blum was one of America’s first oral surgeon, a prestigious specialist who had pioneered the use of x-rays for dental diagnosis. He fees were extortionate, but Theo insisted they visit him anyway. He could borrow money on their furniture to pay the bills, he reasoned. If it eased Hazel’s pain, if Dr. Blum could stop this endless decay in her mouth, then it would all be worth it.
Dr. Blum, at your service
Blum was a balding man with a neatly trimmed mustache, spectacles, and a high forehead. As he introduced himself to Hazel and began his examination, he quickly realized that he had never seen a condition like hers before. Her face was swollen with “pus bags,” but it was the condition of her jawbone that was most perplexing. It seemed almost “moth-eaten.” It literally had holes in it.
But what, Dr. Blum now pondered, could have caused it?
Blum was worth his money. Later, he would try to find out the exact chemicals in the luminous paint, although to no avail. For now, he took a medical and employment history from Hazel and made a provisional diagnosis: she was suffering from “poisoning by a radioactive substance.” He admitted her to the Flower Hospital in New York to operate on her jaw. It would be the first, but not the last, of such procedures Hazel had to endure.
Yet although Blum had offered a diagnosis, and swift and specialist treatment, he didn’t offer the one thing that Theo had been yearning for: hope. That was all he really wanted, to know that there was light at the end of the tunnel; that they could get through this and come out the other side into a shining day, and another one, and another day after that.
Instead, Blum told him “there is little chance of recovery.” All the money in the world couldn’t save his wife now.
Hazel continued to deteriorate rapidly despite many operations, two blood transfusions, and multiple hospital stays. Hazel became unrecognizable; this mysterious new condition, in some patients, led to grotesque facial swellings, literal footballs of fluid spouting from their jaws, and it seems Hazel may have been afflicted in this way.
An unidentified Radium Girl with a jaw sarcoma
On Thanksgiving, November 27, Hazel Kuser was released from the New York hospital and allowed to return to Newark to be with Theo and her mother Grace. As the family gathered together, they tried to feel the blessing of the fact that at least she was home.
But she wasn’t the same person anymore. She had “suffered so frightfully that her mind seemed affected.” Her priest, Karl Quimbly, who was attending the family to offer spiritual comfort, said, “She suffered excruciating agony.”
It was perhaps, then—when they tried to think of Hazel and put her first—the biggest blessing of all when, on Tuesday, December 9, 1924, she finally passed away. She died at 3:00 a.m., at home, with her husband and mother by her side. She was twenty-five. By the time she died, her body was in such a distressing condition that the family would not allow her friends to see it at the funeral.
Culled from: Culled from: Radium Girls
Civil War Casualty Du Jour!
Under a devastating barrage from Federal artillery, Confederate Major General Daniel Harvey Hill was forced to retreat from an assault on Malvern Hill, but he was generous enough to praise the simultaneous —and utterly doomed—advance of the troops commanded by his colleague Major General John B. Magruder:
I never saw anything more grandly heroic than the advance after sunset of the nine brigades under Magruder’s orders. Unfortunately, they did not move together, and were beaten in detail. As each brigade emerged from the woods, from fifty to one hundred guns opened upon it, tearing great gaps in its ranks; but the heroes reeled on—and were shot down by the [infantry supports] at the guns, which a few squads reached… It was not war—it was murder.
Among the Seven Days’ legion of victims was Private Edwin Francis Jamieson, 2nd Louisiana Regiment, whose haunting gaze is one of the most moving images of the Civil War.
Culled from: Portraits of the Civil War