Excerpt from The Radium Girls by Kate Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The girls weren’t entirely clear what was in the paint. Flummoxed by her doctor’s questions, Katherine turned to her colleagues. When she told them what her physician had said, they became frightened. En masse, they confronted Mr. Savoy, who tried to allay their fears, but this time his words about the paint being harmless fell on deaf ears.

And so, as any middle manager would do, he went to his managers. Soon after, George Willis came over from New York to lecture the girls on radium and convince them it was not dangerous; von Sochocky also participated. There was nothing hazardous in the paint, the doctors promised: the radium was used in such a minuscule amount that it could not cause them harm.

And so the girls turned back to their work, their shoulders a little lighter, Katherine probably feeling a bit sheepish that her teenage spots had caused such bother. Her skin cleared up, and so too did the minds of the dial-painters. When one of the greatest radium authorities in the world tells you that you have no need to worry, quite simply, you don’t. Instead, they laughed about the effect the dust had on them. “Nasal discharges on my handkerchief,” Grace Fryer remembered, “used to be luminous in the dark.” One dial-painter, known as a “lively Italian girl,” painted the material all over her teeth one night before a date, wanting a smile that would knock him dead.

Excerpted from The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. Copyright © 2017 by Kate Moore. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.