mrs. donahue victim of radium poisoning dies

Harvard physiology professor Cecil Drinker found that the plant was heavily contaminated with radium. By this point, many of the painters suspected the paint was killing their co-workers.Īt the request of local health authorities, Consumers League of New Jersey brought in eminent outside experts to investigate. Officially, the causes of death were listed as phosphorous poisoning, mouth ulcers, or syphilis. Radium’s sister plant in Orange, N.J., died under mysterious circumstances. The Ottawa plant was the nation’s largest, employing about 100 women at any given time.īetween 19, four dial painters at U.S. Over 1, 000 women worked in the radium dial industry in different factories over the course of a decade. They suffered from excruciating bone pain from fractures, crippling anemia as the radiation killed blood-forming cells in their bone marrow, and various cancers. Their teeth fell out, their jaws shattered. Investigators would later measure the radioactivity in the bones of long-dead dial painters to prove that they had been poisoned.Īs the dial painters ingested more and more paint, their skeletons crumbled from within. However, if the material is swallowed, it permanently insinuates itself into the skeleton, where it continues to emit radiation for the rest of the victim’s life, and indeed long after she is dead. The radium they were using emits low-energy radiation, which bounces harmlessly off the skin. The girls entertained themselves by playing with the “harmless” paint, decorating their nails and teeth with the luminous mixture. An instructor once made a show of swallowing some just to prove the point.

The women were told that the paint - a mixture of glue, water, and radium powder - was harmless. It was a technique borrowed from the china painting industry.īrush-sucking was probably an unsafe way to hand paint china, but with radium the technique became a death sentence. Instructors at the Ottawa Radium Dial Studio, as the plant was known, taught the girls to “tip” their camel hair brushes between their lips to maintain a fine point. Radium Corporation started making glowing watches in Ottawa in 1922. If all goes according to plan, the monument will be unveiled on April 28, Workers’ Memorial Day. The memorial will be erected on the site of a former dial painting plant, on a plot of land donated by the city. Piller’s father, William, is a sculptor who has donated most of the labor to make the bronze statue of a young dial painter. Laborers Local Union 393 has contributed $ 7, 000to the project so far. When Piller got back from Peoria, she started raising $ 40, 000 to erect the first monument to the Radium Girls in her home town. The Peoria chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) awarded Piller its Young Feminist Award in 2007 for her work. The campaign to build a monument in their honor is being spearheaded by Madeline Piller, 17, a local high school senior who became captivated by the story of the “Radium Girls” while working on a play about their story as part of an 8 th grade history project. A tour-de-force of journalism with a meticulous trawl through primary sources and many first-hand accounts of the effect on victims and their families, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the collision between personal and corporate interests.The town of Ottawa, Ill., is banding together to honor the memories of watch dial painters who were poisoned by a radium paint in the town during the 1920s and 1930s. Her detailed account of their fight, the result of which many of them did not live to see, will make you weep with rage. Moore has written a detailed account of the long fight-back through the courts by these dogged and largely uneducated young women when the company refused to accept responsibility for what they had encouraged.

When the bosses were asked: will this stuff hurt us?, the emphatic answer was ‘no.’ Of course, we know now that radium is lethal it is a poison that attacks the whole body, leading to a slow, painful and disfiguring death. It was both magical-seeming, the girls themselves shining in the dark from the radium dust that covered them and also useful for the U.S. The glamour job for young American women between 19 was to paint radium on watches, clock faces, and military dials.

Mrs. donahue victim of radium poisoning dies