After working with glow-in-the-dark paint containing radium while making watches, the so-called "Radium Girls" developed horrifying symptoms including teeth that fell out and bones that disintegrated — before finally dying in agony.
In January 1922, a 24-year-old woman named Amelia Maggia, who went by Mollie, visited her dentist complaining about a toothache. At first, her dentist found nothing seriously wrong. He recommended that she have a tooth pulled, which was a perfectly routine procedure.
But when Mollie came back just a few weeks later, her condition had worsened dramatically.
The dentist then pulled the adjacent tooth, but neither wound would heal. Instead, they both grew larger — as blood and pus seeped into Mollie’s mouth. Pulling more teeth didn’t help the matter, and the dentist soon noticed a worrisome abscess on Mollie’s jaw.
This, too, needed to be removed. But when the dentist operated, pulling away the skin from the gums to look at the bone, something seemed disturbingly wrong.
The bone was a sickly shade of gray. And when the dentist prodded it with his finger, he found, to his horror, that the entire bone crumbled like ash.
With that, the dentist had no choice but to scrape the rest of Mollie’s disintegrated left jawbone out with his finger. But her grisly ordeal was far from over.
That summer, the rest of Mollie’s jaw was removed, alongside pieces of her inner ear. And then, just a few months before her 25th birthday, Mollie Maggia died. She’d developed tumors that cut into her jugular vein and flooded her throat with blood, causing the young woman to choke to death.
So what caused this 24-year-old’s nightmarish condition?
The answer lay with Mollie’s job. Before she got sick, she spent her days painting watches with glow-in-the-dark radium for the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey — exactly like many other young women. And Mollie was just the first of the so-called “Radium Girls” to suffer an excruciating death. After her, several more women died horribly, including one who suffered from a collapse of her vertebrae — they disintegrated just like Mollie’s jaw.
Wikimedia Commons“Radium girls” painting alarm clock faces in the Ingersoll factory in January 1932.
The torturous symptoms that the “Radium Girls” suffered all had to do with the substance that the young women handled every day, a substance which, unbeknownst to them, was incredibly dangerous and deadly. Though men were given lead aprons to protect themselves, the girls were encouraged to lick the paint brushes they used to a fine point so that they could better apply the substance to watch faces. They were assured that doing so wouldn’t be dangerous and, indeed, some of them came to enjoy the pretty, sparkling bits of radium that got onto their clothing and hair.
But though the Radium Girls kept getting sick, it would take time — and concerted effort — for anyone to acknowledge what they had suffered.
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