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摘要
摘要
In the early twentieth century, a group of women workers hired to apply luminous paint to watch faces and instrument dials found themselves among the first victims of radium poisoning. Claudia Clark's book tells the compelling story of these women, who at first had no idea that the tedious task of dialpainting was any different from the other factory jobs available to them. But after repeated exposure to the radium-laced paint, they began to develop mysterious, often fatal illnesses that they traced to conditions in the workplace. Their fight to have their symptoms recognized as an industrial disease represents an important chapter in the history of modern health and labor policy. Clark's account emphasizes the social and political factors that influenced the responses of the workers, managers, government officials, medical specialists, and legal authorities involved in the case. She enriches the story by exploring contemporary disputes over workplace control, government intervention, and industry-backed medical research. Finally, in appraising the dialpainters' campaign to secure compensation and prevention of further incidents--efforts launched with the help of the reform-minded, middle-class women of the Consumers' League--Clark is able to evaluate the achievements and shortcomings of the industrial health movement as a whole.
评论 (2)
Kirkus评论
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. 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. When disease and death followed, the dial painters attempted to prove that radium poisoning was the cause. 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. Clark shows how various forces within society responded to this industrial health issue. Not surprisingly, the radium business resisted efforts to identify radium as a poison or to regulate its use. 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. 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. While the FDA and the FTC investigated the medical safety of radium, its industrial safety was left to the voluntary efforts of business. The league stepped in here, too, persuading the US Public Health Service in 1933 to recommend safety practices. 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. Adroitly combines social, industrial, and labor history to demonstrate the impressive power of determined, organized women. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice 评论
Many people know the story of radium dial painters as an apocryphal tale of the exploitation of workers by industry. Women painting clock and instrument dials with luminescent paints suffered from cancers, anemia, and bone degeneration caused by radium exposure in US workplaces from the 1920s to the 1950s. Clark's exemplary historical account of the "recognition" of radium poisoning as an occupational disease draws on scientific, popular, legal, and the women's own accounts of illness and death. Although Clark might have profitably engaged the epistemological issues raised by the "recognition" of radium poisoning, this might have detracted from the creative use of the history of industrial health, medical ethics, and critiques of corporate models of policy to tell the story of the dial painters and their reformer allies. Questioning "who knew what when," Clark discusses the emergence of laws protecting worker health, and the various models of responsibility and liability implicated in legal formulations, often strongly reflecting employer influence. Highly recommended. All levels. J. L. Croissant; University of Arizona
目录
| Preface | p. vii |
| Acknowledgments | p. xi |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 1 Watch Alice Glow | p. 12 |
| 2 The Unknown God | p. 39 |
| 3 Something About That Factory the Dialpainters and the Consumers' League | p. 65 |
| 4 A """"Hitherto Unrecognized"""" Occupational Hazard the Discovery of Radium Poisoning | p. 87 |
| 5 A David Fighting the Goliath of Industrialism | p. 112 |
| 6 is That Watch Fad Worth the Price? | p. 149 |
| 7 Gimme a Gamma | p. 170 |
| 8 We Slapped Radium Around like Cake Frosting | p. 182 |
| Conclusion | p. 201 |
| Notes | p. 215 |
| Bibliography | p. 253 |
| Index | p. 281 |