Ep. 38: It's Your Poison Running Through My Veins
In the 1910s and 1920s, thousands of young women sat at factory benches painting radium onto watch dials, pressing their brushes to their lips to form a fine point with every single stroke. They were told it was safe. Some were told it would put roses in their cheeks. The scientists who handled the same material wore lead-lined gloves.
This week, Crystal walks through the full story of the Radium Girls — the dial painters of New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, who were poisoned by their employers, gaslit by company-hired doctors, and whose deaths were falsely attributed to syphilis. And then fought back anyway, from courtrooms, from bedsides, from their own living room couches.
We cover the science of what radium does inside the human body, how modern radiation medicine traces its foundations directly to these women, and the extraordinary legal legacy that helped build OSHA and protect every American worker who came after them.
SOURCES:Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America'sShining Women. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2017.
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Historical Marker Database. 'Remembering the Radium Girls.'Ottawa, IL.
Wikipedia. 'Radium Girls'; 'Grace Fryer'; 'Radium.' AccessedApril 2026.
theradiumgirls.com — individual women's biographical profiles.
ExploreTheArchive.com. 'The Tragic Case of the Radium Girls.'2022.
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CBS News / Kang & Pedersen. Excerpt from Quackery: ABrief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. Workman Publishing,2017.
