However, it was only after a string of deaths and an investigation by the County Physician of Newark that the United States Radium Corporation was brought to court for misleading their employees into thinking that the harmful substance was safe. Around 4,000 workers were hired by the United States Radium Corporation to paint watch dials with radium throughout the United States and Canada. Some of them even used the luminescent substance to paint their nails, faces, and teeth.Īs a result, most of the girls employed ingested deadly quantities of radium. The factories hired small-town girls from local communities to paint watch dials with radioactive radium paint and instructed them to lick the paintbrushes to give them a fine point. The incident involved three different factories in Orange, New Jersey Ottawa, Illinois and Waterbury, Connecticut. The case of the Radium Girls was the incident that finally awakened the American public to the harmful effects of radium, but it was too little and too late. Finally, with the 1938 Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act, the government acknowledged the harmful properties of the element, and consumer radium was dead. However, the negative effects that came from lacing consumer products with radium were widespread and deadly, and it wasn’t until the case of the Radium Girls that the radioactive element began to disappear from American households. Of course, the discovery of radium led to a windfall of important scientific discoveries that forwarded medical technology and research. In the years that followed her discoveries, radium started appearing in a myriad of consumer products throughout the United States, becoming a household fixture that was slowly poisoning the American public. In her research, she discovered two previously unknown elements, radium and polonium, which were significant in that they were both more radioactive than uranium. It all started with Marie Curie and her pioneering research on radioactivity that won her two Nobel Prizes, making her the first woman to ever win the award and the first person to ever win it twice. But the sad truth is that countless people fell ill from radiation poisoning as a result of our lack of research into this radioactive element. Now, with our modern understanding of how radium affects the body, this seems completely ludicrous. For more on Radium, check out our exhibit, Healing Energy: Radium in America.It’s hard to imagine a time when we didn’t understand the negative health effects of radiation however, there was a time in the history of the United States when we thought that using radium in everyday products was not only safe but actually healthy, and it wasn’t that long ago. Famous cases of radium poisoning include The Radium Girls, a group of factory workers who contracted radium poisoning after working with radium infused self-luminous paint and Eben Byers, a wealthy socialite and athlete who drank upwards of 1,400 vials of Radithor, a radium tincture, resulting in bone loss and brain abscesses, which eventually killed him.Ĭlick below for a gallery of pamphlets on the past medical use of Radium. Radiation exposure can cause anemia, bone fractures, gastric problems, nausea, headache, necrosis and eventually death. Such products soon fell out of vogue by the 1940s and 1950s when the dangers of radiation poisoning were better understood. ![]() Radium also was used in spas and clinics in the form of therapeutic radium salts and enriched drinking water. Soon after, due to sparse regulations and misunderstandings of its nature, radium was seen as a miracle drug and was added to toothpaste, hair creams, and even food. ![]() Radium, in the form of Radium chloride, was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898.
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