Comment by baxtr
4 days ago
> Marie Curie worked here from 1914 until 1934, the year of her death, handling radioactive elements including radium, which she and her husband Pierre Curie had discovered in 1898. For most of her life, she did this with bare, increasingly radium-scarred hands.
This almost sounds medieval to my ears. It’s kinda freighting how far we’ve gotten in merely 100 years.
The ~15% infant mortality at the time was spectacular progress and yet by modern standards unbearable. Medieval would have been closer to 50%. So on this measure about a third of the way back to the Middle Ages.
https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demograph...
Modern rates range from 0.15% (Slovenia) to 10% (Afghanistan):
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
Louis Pasteur's work establishing germ theory happened in the 1860's, and germ theory as the cause of disease wasn't really widely accepted until roughly this time period.
Blood letting (and its foundation the four humors) was still a thing when the Curies discovered radium.
We have come a long way indeed.
I've recently come around on bloodletting. It seems barbarous, but there are some ailments that it really does help with. It wasn't a wild extrapolation for our ancestors to think it helped with other things. For example, gout: I recently had an appointment to give blood during a pretty bad gout flare, but I didn't want to reschedule so I hobbled over there, cane and all. By the time I was done, I felt better than I had in days. Looked it up, and turns out there's a not-insignificant amount of research on the subject.
I can totally imagine one of my gout-ridden relatives incidentally discovering that after losing a good chunk of blood (maybe a hunting accident, or a fuckup in a pottery workshop) that their foot stopped stabbing in pain. And then going "what else can I cure this way?".
And there's some new things that bloodletting is the only known treatment for. Like PFAS accumulation.
> And then going "what else can I cure this way?"
That's the difference. Bloodletting seems barbarous because it definitely didn't cure most things it was used for.
What is the mechanism by which bloodletting helps? And could we not accomplish the same thing by filtering it, dialysis style?
> PFAS accumulation
Highly overblown. People drink alcohol at quantities know to be carginogenic and we don’t have the histeria that we do about something in the ppb range.
I just read The Radium Girls, about the ̶w̶o̶m̶e̶n children who were hired to paint clock faces and military instruments with radium paint. 100s of young girls who died in their 20s and 30s because they were carelessly exposed to the radiation. It struck me that they were born around the same time as my own grandmother. We really have come a long way in a fairly short amount of time.
You're leaving out the horrific part where they weren't told about the known dangers and we routinely licking/shaping their brushes to get finer points which was a big source of the radium exposure.
I've heard this licking paint brush as a cause of many early deaths. I just don't get it. WTF would you put a paintbrush in your mouth with whatever substance on it? Who does this? How did it start? How is it so common? What is wrong with people!
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They would also paint their faces with it, so when they went out at night they would glow. Crazy
I agree with your point, but describing women in their 20s & 30s as "children" is rather demeaning.
Most of the workers were 13 and 14 year old girls. They didn't die until their 20s and 30s.
The way understood it they worked as children then died in their 20s and 30s.
Someone has to find out the hard way. It was a time when people to Röntgen pictures for fun.
Medieval? The 19th century was not a good place.
My dad had childhood shoe shopping helped by xrays on the high street.
Radiation was treated different back then, look at these choice anecdotes.
> [A patent radioactive medicine]’s most loyal customer was Eben Byers, well known in Pittsburgh society as a wealthy manufacturer, sportsman, and playboy, approaching fifty years of age. Byers continued to take Radithor more desperately each year as his health failed, until in 1931 he entered a hospital, feeble and emaciated, his very breath radioactive. He did not have time to develop cancer but died of direct radiation injury within a few months.
> This was the first proven case of death from a patent radioactive medicine ... The public was not easily convinced that radioactivity could be dangerous at all [...] Doctors of sound reputation continued to use heavy doses of radiation to treat not only serious ailments but also cosmetic problems like warts or excess facial hair. Some even offered men temporary birth control through X-ray sterilization. As late as 1940 many hospital and laboratory workers were casually exposing themselves to radiation at levels far above the official guidelines.
[...]
> During the 1950s X-rays were often used to kill unwanted body hair, thousands of fluoroscopes in shoe Stores across the United States and Europe showed people the bones in their children’s feet; some hospitals routinely X-rayed infants simply to please parents with an inside view of their offspring.
From "Nuclear Fear; a history of images"
A shoe-fitting fluoroscope! I’m only half-joking, but one using terahertz radiation would be very handy to have while shoe-shopping with children.
Kids can’t reliably tell you the fit of their shoes, and some footwear doesn’t yield to the “thumb-at-toe” test.
(1) https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/when-xrays-were-all-the-rage-a...
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An X-ray machine was in the shoe store when I was little, but my father told us not to let it be used on us.
Limbs are much less sensitive to ionizing radiation, though. It's not good to play with in any case, of course.
I wish we still had this. It could be done using far less power today, and besides, it's not like baby boomers are all getting foot cancer.
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Nearly everything you find in nature has such low levels of radioactivity that handling them isn't dangerous.
It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky. Unfortunately thats what Curie did.
> It's only when you start refining and enriching natural things that they become really risky.
It’s a big factor, but not only. You don’t need to refine or enrich anything to have radon poisoning, for example.
It’s still similar. Radon concentrations in medieval dwellings would never reach the kind of concentrations you can see in modern homes because they leaked far more air. I wouldn’t necessarily call a tight home refining or enriching but it’s still dramatically increasing the concentration.
Tunnels and caves could still be problematic though there’s a lot of gasses that can cause problems in such environments.
Xkcd radiatorn chart:
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Inhaling/ingesting concentrated radioactive substances is a big danger with that kind of thing. There are so many variables and it's hard to measure. Health effects depend on where it ends up within the body.
Oh, we're going back there baby.