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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

Radium dial painters working in a factory

镭姑娘是指在1917年左右美国镭公司在奥兰治 (新泽西州)工厂的一群女工，她们因替公司用夜光涂料去画手表表盘而受到辐射中毒。

公司对她们说这些涂料无毒无害，教她们用舌头舔尖笔头以节省原料和精确填涂表盘，结果摄入了数量足以致死的镭；一些女工还用这种发光物质涂在指甲和牙齿上来互开玩笑。

其中的五个女工控告了她们的雇主，此案开先河后，患上职业病的劳工有权去起诉他们的雇主。

美国镭公司

主条目：United States Radium Corporation

1917年到1926年间, 美国镭公司, 原名镭夜光材料有限公司, 从钒酸钾铀矿提取和纯化镭来生产发光涂料，然后以品牌“永亮”（“Undark”）进行销售。 作为国防承包商, 美国镭公司是夜光军事手表的主要供应商。

他们在伊利诺伊州雇佣了超过一百名涂画工人，大多是妇女，误导她们这很安全。

辐射暴露

美国镭公司雇用了大约70名妇女来从事各种工作，包括处理镭，

熟悉镭的副作用的业主和科学家们都小心翼翼地避免暴露接触镭；在工厂的化学家则使用铅屏，口罩和钳子来防护。

美国镭公司甚至还 distributed literature to the medical community 描述镭的有害影响

估计有4000名工人被美国加拿大的公司雇佣来用镭画手表表盘。

他们把胶水、水和镭粉混合，然后用驼绒刷子把这些闪闪发光的涂料刷到表盘上。

The then-current rate of pay, for painting 250 dials a day, was about a penny and a half per dial ($0.36 per dial in today's terms).  

涂了寥寥几笔后，刷子就会开叉变形，于是美国镭公司的监事鼓励工人们用嘴唇或舌头弄尖刷头。 镭姑娘们还将这些致命的涂料画在她们的指甲、牙齿和脸上来相互逗乐。

渐渐许多工人都生病了，因接触辐射而死的人不计其数。

放射病

不久就有许多女工开始贫血、骨折和颚坏死，这种症状现在称为镭颚。 It is thought that the X-ray machines used by the medical investigators may have contributed to some of the sickened workers' ill-health by subjecting them to additional radiation.

It turned out at least one of the examinations was a ruse, part of a campaign of disinformation started by the defense contractor.

U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies rejected claims that the afflicted workers were suffering from exposure to radium.

For some time, doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with requests from the companies not to release their data.

At the urging of the companies, worker deaths were attributed by medical professionals to other causes; syphilis, a notorious sexually transmitted disease at the time, was often cited in attempts to smear the reputations of the women.

Significance

Litigation

The story of the abuse perpetrated against the workers is distinguished from most such cases by the fact that the ensuing litigation was covered widely by the media. Plant worker Grace Fryer decided to sue, but it took two years for her to find a lawyer willing to take on U.S. Radium. A total of five factory workers - Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice - dubbed the Radium Girls, joined the suit. The litigation and media sensation surrounding the case established legal precedents and triggered the enactment of regulations governing labor safety standards, including a baseline of 'provable suffering'.

Historical impact

The Radium Girls saga holds an important place in the history of both the field of health physics and the labor rights movement. The right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was established as a result of the Radium Girls case. In the wake of the case, industrial safety standards were demonstrably enhanced for many decades.

The case was settled in the autumn of 1928, before the trial was deliberated by the jury, and the settlement for each of the Radium Girls was $10,000 ($177,442 in today's terms) and a $600 per year annuity ($10,647 per year in today's terms) while they lived, and all medical and legal expenses incurred would also be paid by the company.

The lawsuit and resulting publicity was a factor in the establishment of occupational disease labor law. Radium dial painters were instructed in proper safety precautions and provided with protective gear; in particular, they no longer shaped paint brushes by lip, and avoided ingesting or breathing the paint. Radium paint was still used in dials as late as the 1960s.

Former factory site

Scientific impact

Robley D. Evans made the first measurements of exhaled radon and radium excretion from a former dial painter in 1933. At MIT he gathered dependable body content measurements from 27 dial painters. This information was used in 1941 by the National Bureau of Standards to establish the tolerance level for radium of 0.1 μCi (3.7 kBq).

The Center for Human Radiobiology was established at Argonne National Laboratory in 1968. The primary purpose of the Center was providing medical examinations for living dial painters. The project also focused on collection of information, and, in some cases, tissue samples from the radium dial painters. When the project ended in 1993, detailed information of 2,403 cases had been collected. No symptoms were observed in those dial painter cases with less than 1,000 times the natural ²²⁶Ra levels found in unexposed individuals, suggesting a threshold for radium-induced malignancies.

文学和电影

• 埃莉诺·斯旺森的诗作“镭姑娘”（Radium Girls）讲述了此事，该诗收录于《A Thousand Bonds: 居里夫人发现镭》（A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium）（2003, ISBN 0-9671810-7-0）
• D. W. Gregory在戏剧《镭姑娘》（Radium Girls）讲述了Grace Fryer的故事，2000年该戏剧在新泽西州的Madison的剧作家剧院（the Playwrights Theatre）首演。

• There is an elaborate reference to the story in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Jailbird (1979, ISBN 0-385-33390-0)
• 诗人拉维妮娅·格林劳以“无辜的镭”为题入诗（The Innocence of Radium）(Night Photograph, 1994)

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=6168

• 历史学家克劳迪亚·克拉克在著作《镭姑娘：1910年至1935年间的妇女和工业卫生体制改革》（Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935）中写了大量案例，揭示其更广泛的历史意义，该书于1997年出版

• Ross Mullner的著作 Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy 详细描绘了此事。 (1999, ISBN 0-87553-245-4)

• The story is told by Jo Lawrence in her short animated film "Glow" (2007)

• 2007年的电影《致命核料 》引用了该故事
• The Michael A. Martone short story It's Time is told from the perspective of an unnamed Radium Girl

• A fictionalized version of the story was featured in the Spike TV show 1000 Ways to Die (#196) and Science Channel's Dark Matters: Twisted But True

• The Case of the Living Dead Women is a website displaying scans of 180 pages of newspaper clippings of the Ottawa, Illinois radium dial litigation

• Radium Halos: A Novel about the Radium Dial Painters a 2009 novel by Shelley Stout is historical fiction narrated by a sixty-five-year-old mental patient who worked at the factory when she was sixteen (ISBN 978-1448696222).

• Author Deborah Blum referenced the story in her 2010 book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

• Author Robert R. Johnson features a story on the radium girls in his book Romancing the Atom. (ISBN 978-0313392795)

• The story is fictionalized in Melanie Marnich's stage play These Shining Lives.

See also

• Occupational disease
• Breaker boy
• Labor rights
• Labor history
• Labor law
• Susanne Antonetta
• Radioactive contamination
• Phossy jaw

References

• University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey - 'University Libraries Special Collections: U.S. Radium Corporation, East Orange, NJ', Records, Catalog 1917-1940 (Revised, June, 2003)
• Undark and the Radium Girls, Alan Bellows, December 28, 2006, Damn Interesting
• Radium Girls, Eleanor Swanson. copy of original
• Poison Paintbrush, Time, June 4, 1928. "That the world may see streaks of light through the long hours of darkness, Orange, N. J., women hired themselves to the U. S. Radium Corporation."
• Radium Women, Time, August 11, 1930. "Five young New Jersey women who were poisoned while painting luminous watch dials for U. S. Radium Corp., two years ago heard doctors pronounce their doom: one year to live."