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> 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 ha
by baxtr 1y 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.
- londons_explore 1y agoNearly 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.
- HPsquared 1y agoInhaling/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.
- kergonath 1y ago> 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.
- Retric 1y agoIt’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.
- signalToNose 1y agoXkcd radiatorn chart: https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- tgv 1y agoSomeone 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.
- tobylane 1y agoMy dad had childhood shoe shopping helped by xrays on the high street.
- lupusreal 1y agoI 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.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI wonder if it’s more of an issue for the person giving the x-rays.
- lupusreal 1y agoNo doubt, but now with CCDs they don't need to be near the operating machine. The machine could be in a lead lined booth with a video display outside it for the shoe store employee to watch.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI think the x-ray machines can now be made much more sensitive so the dose could be vastly smaller. That said, it's a bit unnerving when someone tells you something is save and then goes and hides behind a lead lined booth - even for me as someone who understands the stats around it. I do think it's in general a good idea to use such tools for better fits, shoes tend to focused more on narrow feet which is possibly a side effect of the shoes themselves. I have to stick to certain brands that cater towards wide feet. Perhaps in the future 3D printed shoes will be good enough that I can swap out my regular shoes for hyper-customized ones.
- fhsm 1y agoThe ~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/demographic-facts-sheets/focus-on/infant_mortality_france/ https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demograph...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- js2 1y agoModern rates range from 0.15% (Slovenia) to 10% (Afghanistan): https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortality-rate/country-comparison/ https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
- gmerc 1y agoOh, we're going back there baby.
- zdragnar 1y agoLouis 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.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoI'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.
- zdragnar 1y ago> 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.
- _aavaa_ 1y agoWhat 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.
- imzadi 1y agoI 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.
- rtkwe 1y agoYou'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.
- citizenpaul 1y agoI'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!
- rtkwe 1y agoIt's part of shaping the brush to get a fine point often you run it along the back of your other hand to help shape it but I've seen licking it too on occassion.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoI agree with your point, but describing women in their 20s & 30s as "children" is rather demeaning.