The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

Book Preface

The scientist had forgotten all about the radium. It was tucked discreetly within the folds of his waistcoat pocket, enclosed in a slim glass tube in such a small quantity that he could not feel its weight. He had a lecture to deliver in London, England, and the vial of radium stayed within that shadowy pocket for the entirety of his journey across the sea.

He was one of the few people in the world to possess it. Discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie late in December 1898, radium was so difficult to extract from its source that there were only a few grams available anywhere in the world. He was fortunate indeed to have been given a tiny quantity by the Curies to use in his lectures, for they barely had enough themselves to continue experiments.

Yet this constraint did not affect the Curies’ progress. Every day they discovered something new about their element: “it made an impression on photographic plates through black paper,” the Curies’ daughter later wrote, “[I]t corroded and, little by little, reduced to powder the paper or the cotton wool in which it was wrapped…What could it not do?”1 Marie called it “my beautiful radium”2—and it truly was. Deep in the dark pocket of the scientist, the radium broke the gloom with an unending, eerie glow. “These gleamings,” Marie wrote of its luminous effect, “seemed suspended in the darkness [and] stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.”3

Enchantment… It implies a kind of sorcery, almost supernatural power. No wonder the U.S. surgeon general said of radium that “it reminds one of a mythological super-being.”4 An English physician would call its enormous radioactivity “the unknown god.”5

Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.”6 Enchantment—in the tales of the past, and present—can also mean a curse.

And so, although the scientist had forgotten about the radium, the radium had not forgotten him. As he traveled to that foreign shore, through every second of his journey, the radium shot out its powerful rays toward his pale, soft skin. Days later, he would peer in confusion at the red mark blooming mysteriously on his stomach. It looked like a burn, but he had no memory of coming near any flame that could produce such an effect. Hour by hour, it grew more painful. It didn’t get bigger, but it seemed, somehow, to get deeper, as though his body was still exposed to the source of the wound and the flame was burning him still. It blistered into an agonizing flesh burn that grew in intensity until the pain made him suck in his breath sharply and rack his brains for what on earth could have inflicted such damage without his being aware.

And it was then that he remembered the radium.