If Clark, who worked for six years in the chemical industry, has one take-home message, it is that workplace health and safety require constant vigilance from worker and citizen groups armed with their own scientific experts. The league stepped in here, too, persuading the US Public Health Service in 1933 to recommend safety practices. While the FDA and the FTC investigated the medical safety of radium, its industrial safety was left to the voluntary efforts of business. But under pressure from the Consumers' League, the scientific community finally recognized radium poisoning in 1925, and the league then helped the dial painters appeal to state and later federal agencies and courts for compensation. Scientific researchers, often associated with the radium business and hoping to establish radium as a powerful new medicine, were also at first reluctant to view it as a hazard. Not surprisingly, the radium business resisted efforts to identify radium as a poison or to regulate its use. Clark shows how various forces within society responded to this industrial health issue. Without the assistance of the Consumers' League, a women's voluntary society committed to improving working conditions for women and children, their plight might well have gone unnoticed. When disease and death followed, the dial painters attempted to prove that radium poisoning was the cause. In the 1920s, several thousand young women in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois were exposed to radium while employed to paint luminous numbers on watch dials. Historian Clark (Central Michigan Univ.) analyzes the early efforts of reform-minded women to obtain recognition of radium poisoning, win compensation for its victims, and prevent future harm.
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