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Catherine Wolfe Donohue painted watch dials at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, where women were trained to point their brushes with their lips and so swallowed radium with every stroke. By the 1938 hearings before the Illinois Industrial Commission, radium necrosis had destroyed part of her jaw and she had to be carried in to testify.
Radium poisoning surfaced years after exposure, but New Jersey's two-year statute of limitations ran from the injury itself. By the time the women knew they were sick, the deadline had usually passed. Grace Fryer and four co-plaintiffs (the 'Five Women Doomed to Die') had to argue that the clock should start at discovery. When the lag between harm and symptom exceeds the filing window, the law protects the injurer unless courts count time from when the victim could have known.
The U.S. Radium Corporation commissioned Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker to study its plant. When he concluded that radium was harming the workers, the company withheld his report and gave state regulators a version saying the workers were healthy. Company-linked doctors meanwhile attributed the women's rotting jaws to syphilis, a diagnosis that shifted blame and damaged their reputations. Controlling who produces the evidence, and which version reaches regulators and the public, can delay accountability for years even when the truth has already been documented.
The dial painters' bones and exhaled breath became the dataset from which scientists such as Robley Evans set the first maximum permissible body burden for radium. That limit was later used to protect Manhattan Project workers. Safety standards for a new hazard are often calibrated on the injuries of the first people exposed to it. That means the people least protected at the start pay for the protection of everyone after them.