![]() She was in thrall to it: it stirred her, she wrote, with ‘ever-new emotion and enchantment’. ‘My beautiful radium’, Marie Curie called the element she discovered in 1898. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia - ‘Mollie’ - Maggia. Together, there is a recorded total of over forty clock factory workers who died from probable radium poisoning.Įxcerpt from Kate Moore's book, THE RADIUM GIRLS ![]() ![]() She was the first of the five 'Radium Girls' who banded together to sue US Radium. The radioactive material eventually built up in the bodies of the women and nearly all died of radiation poisoning. Grace and a number of the women she worked with became the first recorded American industrial poisoning incidents on modern safety records. To keep their paintbrushes well pointed, they would put the brush tip in their mouths. These dials were painted with radioactive paint which the all-female painting staff hand painted. Grace Fryer worked in a factory that made the first watches with illuminated dials. Radium poisoning sometimes affected other areas of the body as well Unidentified man suffering from radium poisoning Donohue shows how girls often licked the brushes used to paint radium on the dials.this practice would make the brush tips more pointed and therefore their aim would be more accurate Side view photo of Grace Fryer (post mortem, above)įrom her hospital bed, Mrs. Photos above: Grace Fryer before and after radium poisoning (post mortem)
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