Guy asks about the girls who painted radium onto watch dials:

> It was still an imperceivable threat, was it not.  Were they warned about
>  the practice of using their tongues on the brush?  The Mad Hatters, and the
>  Nike shoe glues were/are all in the same league.

I'm sure that they knew at least as much about the threat of radium poisoning
as they did the dangers of smoking (cigarettes were after all called "coffin
nails" during that same period), if not directly from their workplace then
from common background information, but undoubtedly both were dismissed or
glossed over. Indeed, at the time, radium was seen as something of a miracle
substance and was ascribed nearly magical curative powers.

But it was well-known at the time, undoubtedly more well-known then than it
is now, that Marie Curie, the first two-time Nobel Laureate, died of radium
poisoning. Nonetheless, for an account that argues that the girls didn't know
the dangers, see:

     http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/hist1/radium.html

Ultimately we all die. The exact causes of that death are sometimes traceable
back to early or sustained insults, but most times not with any great
precision. The best that can often be made is a statistical linkage, and in
this case, the linkage is only slightly higher than the general population,
with the few outstanding exceptions of a number of the girls who died more or
less immediately from significant poisonings.

Wirt Atmar

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