
The first woman to die was so affected, the doctor lifted her jaw right out of her face. The body treats radium like calcium, delivering it to bones. To point their brushes, they would wet it with their mouths. By 1915, a single gram cost what would be around $1.9 million in today's money, and that means many of the products didn't contain real radium - fortunately for consumers. The radium girls were a group of workers who painted watch faces with radium paint cuz it glowed.

Children played with toys painted with radium, and performers on the New York stage danced and twirled in costumes that glowed. Radium was in such high demand that prices soared. The radium girls, like many other factory workers at the time. People drank radium water and brushed their teeth with radium toothpaste, and radium cosmetics were all the rage. X-ray photos of her mouth and back showed the development of a serious bone decay. Radium Girls Radium Girls ABOUT THE SHOW LICENSING REGION AVAILABILITY RESOURCES AVAILABLE RESOURCE PHOTOS Explore Scenic Projections Product Images. right? Real doctors started experimenting with it as a cure for things like tuberculosis and lupus, while the quacks started marketing their own so-called cures for everything from acne and baldness to impotence and insanity.


Early experiments using radium to kill cancer cells had been a success, and if it could kill cancer, surely, it could kill whatever else was ailing you. It really started in earnest in 1904, when LD Gardner began marketing a health water he called "Liquid Sunshine." According to the New York Historical Society, belief in radium's healthy benefits was rooted in a massive misstep in logic.
