Kate Moore

People hailed its coming as predicted in the Bible: “The sun of righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings, and ye shall go forth and gambol as calves of the stall.”

Katherine had seen advertisements for one of the most successful products, a radium-lined jar to which water could be added to make it radioactive: wealthy customers drank it as a tonic; the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day

On sale were radium jockstraps and lingerie, radium butter, radium milk, radium toothpaste (guaranteeing a brighter smile with every brushing) and even a range of Radior cosmetics, which offered radium-laced face creams, soap, rouge, and compact powders.

The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was expanding massively, and the new site comprised several buildings, all located in the middle of a residential neighborhood

The dial-painters glowed even brighter from the radium against the dark windows: a workshop of shining spirits laboring through the night

When radium poisoning is made a compensable disease, if ever, it would not be retroactive; so that, as far as these girls were concerned, nothing could be done.”

Around the time he studied with the Curies, Pierre was heard to remark that “he would not care to trust himself in a room with a kilo of pure radium, as it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and probably kill him

“Radium, once deposited in bone,” wrote Drinker in his report, “would be in a position to produce peculiarly effective damage, many thousand times greater than the same amount outside.”

Von Sochocky himself had suffered its silent and sinister wrath: radium had got into his left index finger and, when he realized, he hacked the tip of it off

Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger