The Radium Girls

Young women take jobs painting the faces of watches and instruments with radium paint so the dials glow in the dark. The work begins during the First World War and carries on after it. Their employers tell them the paint is harmless, even healthy.

The women are taught to point each brush between their lips, so a trace of radium goes into the body with every dial. Radium behaves much like calcium, so the body deposits it in bone. There it stays, irradiating them from the inside throughout their lives.

Time passes. Women who once painted their teeth and nails for fun begin to lose teeth, break bones and fall ill with a bone disease that doctors cannot explain.

This is narrative non-fiction, and Kate Moore follows several of the women closely, above all Grace Fryer in New Jersey and Catherine Donohue in Illinois. Doctors misdiagnose them and others dismiss them. The companies know the danger from studies they commissioned themselves, yet deny any link and point to other causes. The women's fight runs through years of disbelief and into the courtroom.

The second half reads as a legal and medical detective story. Physicians such as Harrison Martland establish how radium acts in the body. The lawsuits and settlements that follow help lay the legal basis for treating industrial disease as the employer's responsibility, a basis later occupational safety law builds on. The tone is serious and often hard, driven by the women's struggle to be believed.