Ep. 38: It's Your Poison Running Through My Veins

Ep. 38: It's Your Poison Running Through My Veins

From M⁴: Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem... and Sometimes Murder by M4 Podcast

June 10, 2026 · 1h 11m

About this episode

This episode covers the story of the Radium Girls, young women poisoned by radium while working in factories, and their fight for justice.

In the 1910s and 1920s, thousands of young women sat at factory benches painting radium onto watch dials, pressing their brushes to their lips to form a fine point with every single stroke. They were told it was safe. Some were told it would put roses in their cheeks. The scientists who handled the same material wore lead-lined gloves. This week, Crystal walks through the full story of the Radium Girls — the dial painters of New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois, who were poisoned by their employers, gaslit by company-hired doctors, and whose deaths were falsely attributed to syphilis. And then fought back anyway, from courtrooms, from bedsides, from their own living room couches. We cover the science of what radium does inside the human body, how modern radiation medicine traces its foundations directly to these women, and the extraordinary legal legacy that helped build OSHA and protect every American worker who came after them. SOURCES:Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America'sShining Women. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2017. NIH/PMC. 'Radium Dial Workers: Back to the Future.' pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10563809/ NIH/PMC. 'Facts and Ideas from Anywhere' —…

People in this episode

Host: Crystal

Topics covered

  • Radium Girls
  • toxic exposure
  • legal legacy
  • worker rights
  • radiation medicine

Keywords

  • Radium Girls
  • poisoning
  • worker safety
  • legal history
  • radiation effects

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NIH/PMC, NIST Journal of Research, Sourcebooks, Inc.

Books & works: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

Places: New Jersey, Ottawa, Illinois

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