The Radium Girls Fight Back

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

September 2, 1922. Twenty-four-year-old Mollie Maggia has a toothache. In less than a year, this otherwise healthy young woman will be dead. Others like her will soon follow. They’d all shared what seemed to be a dream job: applying glow-in-the-dark paint to clock faces. The paint glowed because it was saturated with radium, the wonder element of its day. And now that radium has burrowed inside the bones and lungs of the women. How did a supposed wonder element and cure-all come to be seen for what it was – a deadly poison? And how did a group of courageous young women, racing the clock of their own mortality, expose this truth?

Special thanks to Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. If you want to learn more about the story of The Radium girls you can visit https://www.theradiumgirls.com. Also a huge thank you to Art Fryer, nephew of Grace Fryer, one of the “Radium Girls”.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, Original Podcast.
0:04.8	History this week, September 12, 1922.
0:13.2	I'm Sally Helm.
0:15.6	It started with a toothache.
0:19.3	Molly Maggia's dentist took a look at her aching mouth and said she had a run-of-the-mill
0:24.1	infection in her gums. It would probably get better.
0:26.8	Only it didn't.
0:31.4	The dentist removed one tooth and then another and another.
0:37.0	Each time the abscesses left behind refused to heal.
0:42.0	And strange pains began to appear, not just in Molly's mouth, but in her hips, her feet.
0:49.3	One day in the spring of 1922, Molly went to see her dentist again.
0:53.4	He poked a painful spot on her jaw. The bone gave way.
0:58.4	And he realized that he was able to just lift Molly's jawbone out of her mouth.
1:04.7	That's how much this girl in her early 20s is falling apart.
1:09.4	One tiny bright spot.
1:12.7	Molly has Edith meat, a trained nurse who happens to live in the same boarding house that Molly does in orange, New Jersey.
1:20.8	Edith knows Molly pretty well.
1:22.8	He knows that she's full of energy and determined to live independently.
1:27.3	He knows too that she loved her job painting glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watch faces so that you could read them at night.
1:34.2	Until she became too sick to continue.
1:37.8	Edith has been doing what she can to keep Molly comfortable.
1:42.2	But on this horrible afternoon in September, she can't do anything.
	...

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