11.05.06
Radiation Part Quattro–The Dark Side of X-ray Radiation Begins to Unfold
I hear they’ll gaze
Through cloak and gown–and even stays
Those naughty, naughty Rontgen rays.
It wasn’t long before the destructive power of x-ray began to make it’s appearance. It was Thomas Edison who was to discover this as his assistant, Clarence Dally, began to develop burns on his hands from handling x-ray equipment without protection during experiments. With time, the burns would heal, but by 1902 after repeated exposures to x-rays (He perhaps handled the equipment since 1896), Dally’s lesions became resistant to treatment, and he developed cancer on his hands. The cancer continued to spread, and although Dally’s arm and opposite hand were amputated, the cancer continued to spread throughout his body. After his assistant, Clarence Dally, had practically lost the use of both his arms, and even before Dally’s death in 1904, Edison discontinued his work with x-ray stating that he was afraid of them as well as radium and polonium, both known to have properties of radioactivity. By 1904, Clarence Dally was dead. He became the first known American fatality caused by x-ray radiation. Thomas Edison himself damaged his eyes from the use of x-rays. It is said that thereafter, he refused to be x-rayed until his death at the age of 84.
Meanwhile, the public continued to be largely unaware of the dangers of x-rays and radioactive substances. Radium, the radioactive element discovered by Marie Curie, was still believed by the public to be harmless to the body. People commonly believed it to even be “healthful” to the body. Radium continued to be sold in 
various products used topically and internally. Consequently, workers employed in jobs, which exposed them to radium, were still unaware of its dangers until 1927, when a lawsuit was filed in court by Grace Fryer, a former radium dialpainter who had first been employed to paint clock dials with radium in 1917.
As dialpainters, the women employed mixed their paints with glue and radium powder and were encouraged to sharpen the tips of their brushes with their lips as they painted the clock dials. The finer brush points helped them paint the fine details, but the practice served as a primary source of radium ingestion. Most ingested radium would have been excreted, but, because radium and calcium have similar chemical properties, a portion of each day’s dose was deposited into the dialpainters’ bones. This deposited source of radiation from radium damages the bone marrow, causing anemia. Radiation also weakens the bones, so that vertebrae and other bones could break under normal pressure. Long bones might spontaneously snap. Radiation could kill bone tissues so that they became infected easily, especialy in the jaw. As radium decays through its radioactive series, it produces radon, a radioactive gas, which is in part exhaled. Radon retained within bone cavities in the skull causes cancers and other ailments. Reports show that the radium powder, which the dialpainters used to mix in their paints also contaminated the whole working area. The benches and even their clothes were speckled in yellow. The women were not aware of the health risks or dangers of radium and thus occasionally painted their finger nails with the paint. One woman was even reported to have painted her teeth as a glow-in-the-dark surprise while out at night.
Grace Fryer worked as a radium dialpainter for three years until she changed jobs in 1920 to work at a bank. Two years later, she began to develop problems with her teeth, and her jaw developed a painful abcess. X-ray photos of her mouth and back showed the development of a serious bone decay. In July 1925, one of the several doctors she visited suggested that her problems may have been caused by her former occupation as a radium dialpainter. After much difficulty, Fryer was able to file a lawsuit against her former employer for radium poisoning. Four other women with severe medical problems who had also worked at the same dialpainting facility quickly joined the lawsuit. They were Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice. The five eventually became known in newspaper articles carried in papers throughout the U.S. and Europe as “the Radium Girls.” They all had similar medical conditions which consisted of anemia, deteriorating bones, loose teeth (which eventually fell out or had to be extracted), and necrosis of the 
jaw bone, which later became known as “radium jaw.” Before their case was settled in court, other radium dialpainters died with the same mysterious symptoms shared by the five radium girls. One of the first known radium associated death was that of Amelia Maggia in 1922, one of five sisters who also worked as radium dialpainters. According to Claudia Clark, 
author of Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, Maggia’s death certificate listed the cause of death as “ulcerative stomatitis”–inflammation and tissue destructoin of the mouth. Syphilis was listed as the cause. However, due to the radium investigation, Maggia’s body was exhumed for the purpose of conducting an autopsy. Her remains were found to be radioactive with evidence of radium depostion in her bones and no evidence of syphilis.
In 1932, Eben M. Byers, Pittsburgh steel manufacturer and sportsman, died in a New York hospital–”the first New York victim,” says The Herald Tribune, “of a nationally advertised ‘radium water,’ and the second known to the American medical profession.”
“Byers, who was fifty-one, began taking ‘Radithor’ more than two years ago on advice of a Pittsburgh physiotherapist,” says the United Press– It had been reported that Byers was feeling a bit under the weather when Radithor, radium water thought to be healthful, was prescribed to him. According to Scientific American in 1993, Byers became “. . . the victim of a mysterious syndrome that for 18 months had ravaged his body, corroding his skeletal system until one by one his bones started to splinter and break.” Scientific American went on to write that when Byers died, he weighed a mere 92 pounds. Once a handsome, robust man, Byers later became disfigured from operations that had removed most of his jaw and part of his skull in an attempt to stop the destruction of bone. His marrow and kidneys had failed. A brain abscess had left him nearly mute, but he remained lucid almost to the end.
Then in 1934, Marie Curie, the discoverer of radium, died of leukemia, which some believe today to have been the result of radium exposure. In her daughter, Eve Curie’s, book Madame Curie, a Biography, Eve writes of her parents, Marie and Pierre that,
“After exposure to the rays (of radium) the skin became red …; it looked like a burn, but was scarcely painful. After several days the red area without enlarging grew redder; on the twentieth day scabs formed and when they fell away the let a deep wound …; healing of the epidermis first began on the forty-second day ….
“… Mme. Curie carried a few centigrams of the very active substance in a sealed tube and received similar burns…. One exposure of less than half an hour … resulted in a red spot for fifteen days later, that took fifteen more days to heal.
“… we have suffered from various changes in our hands during researches…. The skin of the hands scales; the tips of the fingers come into contact with tubes or capsules that contain very active preparations become hard and sometimes extremely painful; one of us had inflamed fingertips for a fortnight, which subsided with scaling, but at the end of two months were still painful.”
Despite the growing awareness of the dangers of x-ray radiation and other radioactive substances, the use of x-rays and radioactive ores such as uranium and polonium continued to be used and studied. In part five, we’ll go back again to what scientists were exploring for the uses of radiation early last century.
Radiation Part 1Marlakins
