![]() 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. His illness garnered much publicity, with The Wall Street Journal running a story titled "The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off", and brought the problem of radioactive quack medicines into the public eye.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. The disease was the main reason for litigation against the United States Radium Corporation by the so-called Radium Girls.Īnother prominent example of this condition was the death of Eben Byers, an American industrialist, after taking large doses of a patent medicine containing radium over several years. Symptoms were present in the mouth due to use of the lips and tongue, to keep the radium-paint paintbrushes properly shaped. ![]() Martland in 1924 to be symptomatic of radium paint ingestion, after many female workers from various radium paint companies reported similar dental and mandibular pain. Theodor Blum (1924), who described an unusual mandibular osteomyelitis in a dial painter, a condition he called " radium jaw". The first written reference to the disease was by a dentist, Dr. The condition is similar to phossy jaw, an osteoporitic and osteonecrotic illness of matchgirls, brought on by phosphorus ingestion and absorption. The symptoms are necrosis of the mandible (lower jawbone) and the maxilla (upper jaw) as well as constant bleeding of the gums and (usually) after some time, severe distortion due to bone tumours and porosity of the lower jaw. Radium jaw is an occupational disease brought on by the ingestion and subsequent absorption of radium into the bones of radium dial painters and those consuming radium-laden patent medicines.
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