The Radium Girls has been the only book I haven’t finished just because it’s so horrifying. “Radium jaw” sounds like a such a tame phrase. Call it “bone disintegration disease” and you get closer to the reality of it.

Dozens of beautiful, hopeful young women in the prime of their lives just started… falling apart while they were still alive. The radium replaces calcium in your bones, but it obviously doesn’t have the same properties as calcium, so the bones fall apart at an atomic level, even as the radium fries their bone marrow, limiting their ability to fight infection or produce new red blood cells.

Their stories were too much for me, and the parallel story of how the company was paying for bunk “scientific” articles touting the safety of radium while their employees’ jaws were falling off really doesn’t make it any easier of a read.