Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings October 2017 - 483

About 1921 the original dial painters from 1916 or so began
having symptoms: toothaches, mouth sores, pain in the gums
and jaws, aches and pains in their hips and feet. Teeth began falling out. One girl lost all of her teeth, and her jaw bone became so
decayed that the dentist simply pulled it out of her mouth. The
mouth sores made eating painful. One girl died when a mouth
sore burrowed into the jugular vein, causing fatal hemorrhage.
The dentists were baﬄed by these symptoms. Phosphorous poisoning was believed to be the problem, but phosphorous levels
were not elevated. One dentist believed it was "an occupational
condition" but wasn't sure what occupation caused it.
One dentist, after examining one of the dial-painting girls
whose teeth were falling out, notiﬁed the Industrial Hygiene
Division of New Jersey to investigate. Within days an inspector
toured the Orange plant, observed the dial-painting studio and
especially the lip-pointing, and suggested that it was a "dangerous practice." In January 1923, the deputy commissioner of the
New Jersey Department of Labor also inspected the plant and
commented: "It is my belief that the serious condition of the jaw
[of one of the dial painters] has been caused by the inﬂuence of
radium." This was a radical idea at the time, although the USRC
had ﬁles of reprints of radium studies suggesting the dangers of
radium. The articles went as far back as 1906. Some months after
his departure from the company, Dr. Willis became ill and in
September 1922 he died. His right thumb had been amputated;
tests revealed it was riddled with cancer. Willis published the
ﬁndings of his illness in the February 1923 issue of the Journal
of the American Medical Association, writing: "The reputation for
harmlessness enjoyed by radium may, after all, depend on the fact
that, so far, not very many persons have been exposed to large
amounts of radium by daily handling over long periods. . . . There
is good reason to fear that neglect of precautions may result in
serious injury to the radium workers themselves."
One by one, the radium dial painters, especially the original
ones in Newark beginning in 1916 and 1917, developed multiple
signs and symptoms. Because the girls kept in touch with one
another, they learned that the illnesses among them had various
commonalities. Eventually the company was sued. Although the
girls won the verdict, they won very little money. The radium
girls, however, did not die in vain. Although the women could
not save themselves from the poison that riddled their bones, in
countless ways their sacriﬁce saved many thousands of others.
In September 1922, 800 miles from Orange, New Jersey,
a radium dial-painting plant was started in Ottawa, Illinois, a
town of 10,816 people located 85 miles southwest of Chicago.
They quickly hired local girls for the dial painting. When they
stepped out at night, their dresses and hats and sometimes even
their hands and face glowed from the phosphorescence of the
luminous paint. The dial painting was an elite job for the poor
working girls in the area.
World War II started in Europe in 1939, again producing
an enormous demand for luminous dials to light the dashboards of military machines and the wristwatches of soldiers.
Yet, thanks to the trials of the original watch dial painters and
their colleagues due to their bravery in speaking out about what
had happened to them, dial painting was now the most feared
October 2017

occupation among young women. No longer could the government sit idly by the radium girls' demise. Safety standards
were introduced that protected a whole new generation of dial
painters based entirely on knowledge gained from the bodies
of those women who had come before.
When the US entered the war in December 1941, the US
radium dial-painting industry exploded, with USRC alone increasing its personnel by 1006%. Radium dials were even bigger
business than the ﬁrst time around: >190 g of radium was used
by the US for luminous dials during World War II compared
with <30 g used worldwide in World War I. In addition, chemist Glenn Seaborg, leader of the atomic bomb-making enterprise
(the Manhattan Project), issued safety guidelines to the workers
using radioactive plutonium based directly on the radium safety
standards produced by the radium dial painters. An oﬃcial of the
US Atomic Energy Commission wrote: "If it hadn't been for those
dial painters, the [Manhattan] project management could have
reasonably rejected the extreme precautions that were urged on it
and thousands of workers might well have been, and might still be,
in great danger." The women had been, oﬃcials said, "invaluable."
Even after World War II was over, the dial painters' legacy
continued to save lives as the world entered the age of atomic
energy. Large-scale production of radioactive materials seemed
inevitable. Five years after World War II ended, the nuclear arms
race began; over the next decade hundreds of above-ground
atomic tests were conducted across the globe. Just as radium had
done to the dial painters, these isotopes, especially a particularly
dangerous, newly created one called strontium-90, began to
deposit in human bones. The Atomic Energy Commission dismissed the concerns. "The risks, it said, were very small when
compared to the terrible future we might face if we fell behind
in the nuclear defense eﬀort." The public, however, was troubled.
After all, the radium dial painters' agony had alerted the world to
internal radiation. It was known that strontium-90 was chemically similar to radium. Medical studies began immediately, including in New Jersey and Illinois; later, the research would be
amalgamated into the Center for Human Radiobiology, which
was located in a multimillion dollar clinic called the Argonne
National Laboratory, located 75 miles from Ottawa, Illinois.
Special lead-lined rooms were constructed, buried under 3 feet of
concrete and 10 feet of earth, in which the quantity of radium in
the dial painters' bodies was measured. The research was designed
to help future generations. Some dial painters were still living.
Radium was known to settle in the girls' bones and known to
cause late-onset sarcomas, but when such deadly tumors might
begin to grow was unclear. Consequently, the living dial painters
were sought in earnest. Employment records were procured and
snapshots of those long-ago USRC picnics were unearthed. The
girls were termed "a reservoir of scientiﬁc information." Special
investigators were hired to track them down. Those they found
were usually willing to cooperate. A sister of one of the dial painters, who had never worked at the USRC plant, was found to be
contaminated by radium. She had shared a bed with her sister.
In 1963, at least partly in response to the research on the
dial painters, President John F. Kennedy signed the International
Limited Test Ban Treaty that prohibited atomic tests above

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings October 2017