[gmw]

I belatedly realised there was another caution in this situation that the book does such a good job of obscuring that I forgot about it: Just because only a few participants are showing ill effects does not mean those effects were not caused by the employment.

Hundreds of women worked in this occupation, but the ill effects were apparent in about 1 in 20 (or just over 5%, if I properly interpreted the details that AnotherCat put up - though even those quotes admit to not having reliable measures against the earlier cases*). The initial proportion asking for compensation was much less than that.

This is not intended as a get out of gaol free card for the companies, but it does give a little more realistic context surrounding their reaction. I have not done enough study to know whether these sorts of odds should have been apparent to businesses at the time, but they would certainly have obscured the situation.

Lets double the odds but simplify the situation. If 10 people sit down to a meal and 1 of them gets ill, do you blame the food? Unlikely. If 100 people sit down to a meal and 10 of them get ill, you may get concerned, but you will also be looking to see what else those people did together. If 100 people sit down to a meal, and then 5+ years pass before 10 of them get ill, how quickly do you suppose anyone will decide it was that particular meal that did it?

The threat was real. No one, a century later, is arguing otherwise. But recognising the threat at the time was not as obvious as this book presents it. One of the reasons why this situation is historically so important is because there were enough participants (Wikipedia says 4000) to allow statistical analysis to give meaningful results. It was the sort of experiment that no one could ever have run deliberately, and these women paid the price of our collective ignorance.


* The Wikipedia article on this says "The inventor of radium dial paint, Dr Sabin A. Von Sochocky, died in November 1928, becoming the 16th known victim of poisoning by radium dial paint.", which - in the context of what we read in this book - would seem to suggest the 1/20 value is not unreasonable.