Alaina Urquhart

And given all the ways that the dial painters were exposed to radium, it was dentists who usually heard about the first symptoms, because remember, a lot of that is going in the mouth area.

Beginning in the late 1910s, girls were showing up at their dentist's office with complaints of tooth pain, loose teeth...

Ulcers were showing up.

And in more extreme cases where the teeth had to be pulled, dental surgeons started noticing that the sockets wouldn't heal.

They would just stay an open wound and not heal.

And then they would become infected.

Right, of course.

It's your fucking mouth.

And they were like, what the fuck is this?

And these symptoms caused by exposure to radium and its tendency to decay bone matter were eventually lumped together into what was informally referred to as radium jaw.

you can Google radium jaw at your own risk.

Is it horrible?

It's just very upsetting.

I'm about to.

So when the war ended in late 1918, demand for radium dials decreased, like dramatic decrease, as did the need for so many dial painters.

We didn't need as many.

Yeah, Mikey and Ash just looked it up at the same time.

You had a...

Yeah, that's the one.

That's the one.