In the years following World War I, Radium Dial was one of
the best places for working-class girls of Ottawa, Illinois to earn good wages
to help support their family or set savings aside for when they were married.
Little did those girls know that the material they used to paint watch and
instrument dials was slowly poisoning them. Even when realization dawned, they
were faced with opposition from the radium industry, which did not wish to see
their profits disappear, and the medical community, which had been using radium
as a miracle cure. One group of dial painters decided they did not want to see
future workers suffer their fate, so they decided to form the Society of the
Living Dead.
The called themselves the Society of the Living Dead because
some victims of radium poisoning had the eerie appearance of walking corpses.
Charlotte Purcell had an arm amputated, and Catherine Donohue’s body wasted
away to less than half of her healthy weight. Other women grew giant tumors or
had their jaws and noses rot away. The varied symptoms of radium poisoning was
one of the factors that made it difficult to diagnose and hold employers
responsible.
The Society got the attention of the press and used it to
spread awareness of the struggle of the “radium girls,” as they came to be
known. Even the women who did not enjoy being the center attention allowed
media photos of their emaciated bodies and underdeveloped children to increase
sympathy and action. The news stories requested that readers send funds to help
support the disabled workers whose families were struggling with medical bills
and loss of wages.
As the former dial painters sickened and died, Radium Dial
and other companies in the radium industry fought to deny liability or even the
idea that radium might be causing their health problems. Without the work of
the Society of the Living Dead, the fight to see radium poisoning recognized as
an occupational hazard might have taken years longer. These women’s quest to
protect others from the harm they had suffered saved countless lives, even as
they lost their own.
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