![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/Theodor-Blum.wiki_.jpg\")
<\/a>\nDr. Blum, at your service<\/em><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But what, Dr. Blum now pondered, could have caused it?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Instead, Blum told him “there is little chance of recovery.” All the money in the world couldn’t save his wife now.<\/p>\n
Hazel continued to deteriorate rapidly despite many operations, two blood transfusions, and multiple hospital stays. Hazel became unrecognizable; this mysterious\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n It was perhaps, then\u2014when they tried to think of Hazel and put her first\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n Culled from: Culled from: Radium Girls<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 \u2014and utterly doomed\u2014advance of the troops commanded by his colleague Major General John B. Magruder:<\/p>\n 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\u2014and were shot down by the [infantry supports] at the guns, which a few squads reached… It was not war\u2014it was murder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nAn unidentified Radium Girl with a jaw sarcoma<\/em><\/p>\nCivil War Casualty Du Jour!<\/h3>\n