![]() Along the way it speaks of fear and loyalty and truth itself.įirst, I want to say that a three-star review from me is not a negative review. The story goes beyond the Radium Dial case and reflects much about our attitudes toward work, women, mental illness and aging. ![]() Stout has found a unique voice in which to tell the tragic story of the Radium Dial workers and at the same time to say much about life in this country. ![]() Sometimes fiction can speak truth in ways that the bare facts cannot. So when I came across Radium Halos by Shelley Stout I was very excited. I am sure this background is one reason I became a government lawyer enforcing workers' rights. I was deeply proud of my father and infuriated, as he was, by the injustice inflicted on these women. I grew up in the shadow of the Radium Dial case, a landmark in workers' rights in this country. Grossman, represented women from Ottawa, Illinois in litigation against the Radium Dial Corporation seeking not merely damages but also recognition of what had been done to them. Includes a Foreword by Leonard Grossman, son of the attorney for the Radium Dial painters.įive years before I was born, my father, Leonard J. She tells us her story through flashbacks, slowly revealing her past, the loved ones she's lost, and the dangerous secrets she's kept all these years. Our narrator is Helen Waterman, a 65-year-old mental patient who worked at the factory when she was 16. 'Oops' is never good occupational health policy.Radium Halos is historical fiction based on the true events of the Radium Dial Painters, a group of female factory workers who, in the early 1920s, contracted radiation poisoning from painting luminous watch dials with radium paint. "We really don't want our factory workers to be the guinea pigs for discovery. By the time World War II came around, the federal government had set basic safety limits for handling radiation.Īnd, she says, there are still lessons to be learned about how we protect people who work with new, untested substances. At 107 years old, she was the last of the radium girls.ĭeborah Blum says the radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. You just don't know what to blame," she said. "I was left with different things, but I lived through them. There's no way to know if her time in the factory contributed. Over the years, she had some health problems - bad teeth, migraines, two bouts with cancer. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning.īut Mae Keane lived. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. Radium Corporation for poisoning and won. At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S. ![]() Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. "There was one women who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum. The radium they had swallowed was eating their bones from the inside. By the mid-1920s, dial painters were falling ill by the dozens, afflicted with horrific diseases. "I often wish I had met him after to thank him," Keane said, "because I would have been like the rest of them." "I wouldn't put the brush in my mouth," she remembered many years later.Īfter just a few days at the factory, the boss asked her if she'd like to quit, since she clearly didn't like the work. Her first day, she remembers she didn't like the taste of the radium paint. In 1924, a woman named Mae Keane was hired at a factory in Waterbury Connecticut. "Of course, no one thought it was dangerous in these first couple of years," explains Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |