The Radium Girls

Kate Moore tells the story of the "dial painters": young women hired during and after the First World War to paint watch and instrument faces with radium paint so they would glow in the dark. Told the paint was harmless, even healthy, they were taught to shape their brushes to a fine point with their lips, swallowing a trace of radium with every dial. Radium is chemically close enough to calcium that the body stores it in bone the same way, and once there it stayed, irradiating the women from within for the rest of their lives.

Years later, the same women who had once painted their teeth and nails to glow for fun began losing teeth, breaking bones and suffering from a bone disease no doctor could explain. The companies that employed them, aware of the danger from their own commissioned studies, denied any link and blamed other causes. Moore follows the women, especially Grace Fryer in New Jersey and Catherine Donohue in Illinois, through the years of being disbelieved, misdiagnosed and dismissed, and through the court cases that finally forced the companies to acknowledge what they had known.

The book's second half is a legal and medical detective story: it traces how physicians such as Harrison Martland proved radium's mechanism in the body, and how the resulting lawsuits and settlements built the legal foundation for treating industrial disease as an employer's responsibility rather than a worker's misfortune, a foundation the rest of occupational safety law was built on.