Drinker found a heavily contaminated work force, unusual blood conditions in virtually everyone, and advanced radium necrosis in several workers.Ĭlose-up of a radium dial painters work station, Ottawa, Illinois.ĭuring the investigation, Drinker noticed that U.S. Hamilton was on the league’s national board, and as it turned out, she was already involved in another aspect of the same case.Ī few years earlier, a colleague at Harvard, physiology professor Cecil Drinker, had been asked to study the working conditions at U.S. New Jersey Consumers League chairman Katherine Wiley brought in a statistical expert and also contacted Alice Hamilton, a Harvard University authority on workers’ health issues. Poisoning, mouth ulcers and syphilis, but factory workers suspected that the dial painting ingredients had something to do with it. The causes of death in the Orange cases were listed as phosphorous The request was not unprecedented, since league officials had been involved in many official state and federal investigations. The request of a city health department official in Orange, New Jersey, brought the Consumers League into an investigation of the suspicious deaths of four radium factory workers between 19. Formed in 1899, the Consumers League fought for an end to child labor, a safe workplace and minimum pay and decent working hours for women.3 Lippmann was a crusading journalist and former muckraker who edited a powerful New York newspaper at a time when New York newspapers were the most influential in the country. Grace Fryer probably would have been another unknown victim of a bizarre new occupational disease if it had not been for an organization called the Consumers League and journalist Walter Lippmann, the editor of the New York World. The colleague had no medical training either - he was a vice president of U.S. The Columbia specialist was not licensed to practice medicine - he was an industrial toxicologist on contract with her former employer. Later, Fryer found out that this examination was part of a campaign of misinformation started by the U.S. A consultant who happened to be present emphatically agreed. The results, he said, showed that her health was as good as his. Finally, in July 1925, one doctor suggested that the problems may have been caused by her former occupation.Īs she began to investigate the possibility, Columbia University specialist Frederick Flynn, who said he was referred by friends, asked to examine her. X-ray photos of her mouth and back showed the development of a serious bone decay.
RADIUM GIRLS MOVIE QUESTIONS SERIES
She consulted a series of doctors, but none had seen a problem like it. The hazel eyes that had charmed her friends now clouded with pain. About two years later, her teeth started falling out and her jaw developed a painful abscess. Grace quit the factory in 1920 for a better job as a bank teller.
Those days, most people thought radium was some kind of miracle elixir that could cure cancer and many other medical problems. Radium Corporation and scientists who were familiar with the effects of radium. Nobody knew it was harmful, except the owners of the U.S. It didn’t have any taste, and I didn’t know it was harmful.” (1) “I think I pointed mine with my lips about six times to every watch dial. “Our instructors told us to point them with our lips,” she said. After a few strokes, the brushes would lose their shape, and the women couldn’t paint accurately. They mixed up glue, water and radium powder into a glowing greenish-white paint, and carefully applied it with a camel hair brush to the dial numbers. Racks of dials waiting to be painted sat next to each woman’s chair. Grace started working in the spring of 1917 with 70 other women in a large, dusty room filled with long tables. They all had a good laugh, then got back to work, painting a glow-in-the-dark radium compound on the dials of watches, clocks, altimeters and other instruments. The women even painted their nails and their teeth to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out. But everyone knew the stuff was harmless. It was a little strange, Fryer said, that when she blew her nose, her handkerchief glowed in the dark. Grace Fryer and the other women at the radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, had no idea that they were being poisoned. The Doors of Justice are barred to the “Doomed Radium Victims,” and notes explain that it is due to “statute of limitations, summer vacation, postponement,” in this New York World editorial cartoon.īy Bill Kovarik and Mark Neuzil, from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (Sage, 1996), p.
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