The Radium Girls

Marvel awarded Catherine her past medical expenses, back salary for the entire period she had not been able to find employment due to her condition, damages, and an annual life pension of $277 ($4,656) for the remainder of her life. It came to a total of some $5,661 ($95,160) and was the maximum possible award the judge could deliver under the provisions of the law

He had been an early supporter of the Suffragettes; an article on their major march on Washington was headlined: 200 WOMEN AND 1 BACHELOR2—and that bachelor was Leonard Grossman.

When his story made the news, the headlines read: THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTIL HIS JAW CAME OFF

Judge Backes came up with an inspired interpretation of the statute for Berry. He suggested that because the girls’ bones contained radium and the radium was still hurting them, they were still being injured; “therefore, the statute began tolling anew each moment of that injury.”38 It was brilliant

But now, when Berry asked the authorities to look into exactly who Flinn was, he received the following letter from the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners: “Our records do not show the issuance of a license to practice medicine and surgery or any branch of medicine and surgery to Frederick B. Flinn.”21
Flinn was not a medical doctor. His degree was in philosophy.
He was, as the Consumers League put it, “a fraud of frauds.”

Isidor Kalitsch of Kalitsch & Kalitsch

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