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Radium necrosis4/27/2023 Everything from radium-impregnated fabrics used to wrap babies and help with arthritis to a radioactive heating pad, to a radium tonic to prevent grey hair to radium bath salts to Dengen’s Radio-Active Eye Applicators, a pair of eye-glasses that instead of lenses placed pods filled with radioactive materials right next to the eyes and claimed to restore perfect vision and cure headaches.įor two decades radium was something that was willfully worn, ingested, or shoved up the nether bits with complete disregard for the growing number of suspicious deaths surrounding those that manufactured the goods consumers were clamoring for. The number of products seen in the marketplace was astounding. government would step in and put an end to the misleading advertising. And those products that claimed to have the radioactive edge but really didn’t? Thankfully the U.S. Starting in 1910, if your product didn’t have radium in it, it got lost in an ever-expanding pack of those that did. How could something with an intoxicating glow to it be bad for you, right? Of course, this was in the early 1900s, and radium had really only been around since 1898 when Marie and Pierre Currie discovered it and later turned that discovery into a Nobel prize five years later. These stories must be told even today because a Geiger counter, waved over the grave of a radium girl, clicks for 1,000 years.Before the negative side effects of a little something called radium were fully understood, it was the kind of ingredient that got tossed into just about every type of product you could imagine. ![]() "Radium Girls" fits with Marjane Satrapi's "Radioactive," a sterling effort about Marie Curie, and both complement Radiant, a dual biography of Curie and Fuller, due out next year. Mohler and Lydia Dean Pilcher direct "Radium Girls" at the same walk as Pilcher's recent "A Call To Spy." Production design by Emmeline Wilks-Dupoise and art direction by Gabriella Moses are noteworthy, as is the editing that adds verisimilitude with vintage films. Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw's script tries to bundle the atmosphere of the Twenties, including flappers, King Tut, and spirits. Katherine Drinker, the real scientist who produced an early study for U.S. They are finely supported by Cara Seymour and Susan Heyward Veanne Cox plays Dr. Josephine is well played by Abby Quinn ("I'm Thinking of Ending Things") and Bessie, by Joey King ("Fargo") with just enough melodrama. The trial proceeds like later, similar efforts to prove that tobacco companies knew nicotine was addictive. Much of "Radium Girls" covers the 1928 trial brought by the young women against the owner of the company, who knew radium killed. Later, as she witnesses Josephine's teeth fall out, Bessie becomes convinced that their sister Mary had died three years before of radium necrosis. Studious Josephine paints more dials than her peers, but star-struck Bessie hesitates to point the brush with her lips, avoiding the nasty aftertaste. Josephine and her sister Bessie work for American Radium (actually United States Radium Co.). Now a good film, "Radium Girls" tells the part of the story set in Newark but with fictionalized characters. ![]() In 2017, Kate Moore told the women's story in a searing investigative report called Radium Girls. It attacked the young women who were hired to paint watch dials in the Twenties. But the chemical element is also a killer. In World War I, radium lit up watch dials so doughboys could see at night. It ate at cancer - probably saved Fuller's life. It was promoted as "liquid sunshine." The astounding dancer Loïe Fuller wanted a chunk of it to liven her costumes. Radium, first identified by Marie Curie and her husband Pierre, was thought to be an amazing discovery.
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