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In a steel foundry people wear great leather aprons and heavy gloves to protect them from the steel - because it's very very hot. The protection is not required later when the steel as cooled back to room temperature. (It still carries some heat, it's not at absolute zero, but that heat is not dangerous.)
What evidence is there that anyone in the early 1900s realised that the harm caused by being close to (relatively) large amounts of radium was any different? The injury was described as looking like a burn. If a person gets burned they heal; if the thing they touched was not hot enough to burn then no healing is necessary and protection would have been redundant. Where is the evidence from before 1924 that the situation with radium was any different in its effects on the human body?
Actually, there was evidence: in the form of its effects on tumours. But no one understood why it worked and the effect was, at that time, interpreted as entirely positive.
It would be nice to think that in these modern times we have learned enough to be wary of things we do not understand. It's not true, of course, but it would be nice to think it anyway. However it is true to the extent that we are aware that some things accumulate in our system and so we must watch out for that. What these women went through was part of teaching us that lesson.
And all of that sits on the assumption that they had the same rules and expectations for workplace safety that we have now. They did not. Some of the advancement happened because of what these women went through.
issybird, I agree that by the time Radium Dial start taking out ads, doing autopsies and getting the girls health-checked it is apparent that they know the risks exist. Their failure to take appropriate action from - at least - that time is culpable, even by the (lower) standards of that time.
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