2/20/2023 0 Comments Radium girls glowing in coffin![]() ![]() ![]() Drinker of Harvard University, ‘would be in a position to produce peculiarly effective damage, many thousand times greater than the same amount outside.’ Honey-combed bones ‘Radium, once deposited in bone,’ wrote Dr Cecil K. Fortunately, although they are powerful, they are unable to penetrate the skin, so this particularly hazardous radiation did not affect most workers.īut in the radium girls, the alpha rays were now inside them. The alpha rays, according to Dr Harrison Martland, are ‘physiologically and biologically intensely more irritating than beta or gamma’ rays. Workers handling large amounts learned to protect themselves with lead aprons, which blocked the alpha, beta and gamma rays radium emitted. Pierre Curie remarked that a kilo of radium ‘would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him’. Almost from the moment it was discovered by the Curies in 1898, scientists realised it was dangerous, as many suffered radiation burns from handling it. By the time they became sick, the women were already doomed to die. When the dial-painters swallowed it, the radium entered their bones and once there became impossible to remove, with a half-life of 1,600 years. Radium acts identically – except it destroys the bone. When we drink a glass of milk, the calcium in it deposits in our bones to make them strong. Radium is chemically similar to calcium, which is a bone-seeker. A dial-painter with a radium-induced sarcoma of the chin Bone-seeker ![]()
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