Radium Girls

The author of this book is Robert R. Johnson, who is a professor of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication in the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University. The primary audience for this text is rhetoricians with a focus on science and technologies, but perhaps also people in the field of law. Johnson implies that rhetoric is about mindset, and how that mindset affects our actions. He says that “atomic mindset is created through…. [the] power that atomic usage has held over humans….to become an obsession of human consciousness and, ultimately, action.” Johnson seems to imply that genre is two different ways of thinking, calculative and meditative. Calculative thinking, which is what he says is the mindset that led to the atomic bomb, is a thought process that leads from one thing to the next with the objective to reach a specific goal. However, meditative thinking is a thought process that allows us to not go down a single goal path with one single ideology. The main point of the Radium Girls story is that mindsets were shown by these two sides. The amount of people during this time period that believed in the possibility that these girls were poisoned by radioactive chemicals from working with undark were few and far between, at least until the end of the trials. These few people, such as Dr. Cecil Drinker or Raymond Berry, exhibit the meditative mindset, as they were open to the possibility that this could be harmful, despite the company insisting it wasn’t. On the flip side, people running and affiliated with the U.S. Radium Co. exhibit the calculative mindset. Even though they knew the substance was harmful, they denied it, insisted the workers lick their brushes to keep them sharp, and even sold radioactive dust to be used in childrens’ sandboxes, in an attempt to make profits. This book shows why rhetoric is important in a field such as science. The desire for atomic weapons was an obsession that became reality, which led to immoral actions on the part of this company. Similar cases to this one have come up in the past, and can come up again in the future as more technologies continue to be invented.