Download PDF by Claudia Clark: Radium girls, women and industrial health reform: 1910-1935

By Claudia Clark

ISBN-10: 0807846406

ISBN-13: 9780807846407

Within the early 20th century, a gaggle of girls staff employed to use luminous paint to monitor faces and software dials came upon themselves one of the first sufferers of radium poisoning. Claudia Clark's booklet tells the compelling tale of those ladies, who initially had no concept that the tedious activity of dialpainting was once any diverse from the opposite manufacturing unit jobs on hand to them. yet after repeated publicity to the radium-laced paint, they started to strengthen mysterious, frequently deadly health problems that they traced to stipulations within the office. Their struggle to have their indicators well-known as an commercial affliction represents an enormous bankruptcy within the background of recent wellbeing and fitness and hard work policy.Clark's account emphasizes the social and political elements that encouraged the responses of the staff, managers, executive officers, clinical experts, and criminal specialists excited about the case. She enriches the tale through exploring modern disputes over office keep watch over, govt intervention, and industry-backed scientific learn. eventually, in appraising the dialpainters' crusade to safe repayment and prevention of extra incidents—efforts introduced with the aid of the reform-minded, middle-class ladies of the patrons' League—Clark is ready to overview the achievements and shortcomings of the commercial healthiness circulation as an entire.

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Additional info for Radium girls, women and industrial health reform: 1910-1935

Sample text

The young women applied radium to their buttons, their fingernails, their eyelids; at least one, described by a friend as "a lively Italian girl," coated her teeth with it before a date, for a smile that glowed in the dark. After working in the studio, the women were covered with luminous powder. At night, at home, they would notice that their clothes luminesced, their fingers glowed, their hair shone in the dark. One young dialpainter, employed during the summer by a dialpainting company in Brooklyn, would return from work "with her hair and dress speckled with yellow.

2 million luminous watches. In New Jersey the number of dialpainters rose from the 100 Page 16 employed in 1916 in Newark to an average of 300 in Orange in 1917 and 1918. In 1919 about 200 women painted dials for the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation. 10 The dialpainting studio, built on the second floor of one of the new buildings in Orange, was a pleasant place to work. Light streamed in through large windows. In front of the windows were long tables at which the dialpainters sat. The room was quiet and the young women gathered there could socialize.

No definitive answer can be derived from this case study of radium poisoning. Rather, I hope to suggest two avenues of exploration in answering these historical/ethical questions. The first is to address the contemporary debate Page ix about these matters: at least some people recognized the ethical duties and ethical failings of health workers, whereas others defended health workers' inaction. Second, with knowledge of the health effects of radium and skills to measure those effects held by a very small number of scientists, we must consider whether those with knowledge and skills had a greater ethical duty to share them than if such knowledge and skills were widely available.

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Radium girls, women and industrial health reform: 1910-1935 by Claudia Clark


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