Half Lives The Unlikely History Of Radium Lucy Jane Santos by Lucy Jane Santos instant download after payment.

Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination & entrepreneurial zeal.

Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt, a glow-in- the-dark dance costume – to its role as a supposed cure-all in everyday twentieth-century life, when medical practitioners & business people (reputable & otherwise) devised ingenious ways of commodifying the new wonder element, & enthusiastic customers welcomed their radioactive wares into their homes.

Lucy Jane Santos—herself the proud owner of a formidable collection of radium beauty treatments—delves into the stories of these products & details the gradual downfall & discredit of the radium industry through the eyes of the people who bought, sold & eventually came to fear the once-fetishized substance.

Half Lives is a new history of radium as part of a unique examination of the interplay between science & popular culture. 

°°° 

Lucy Jane Santos is an expert in the history of twentieth-century health & beauty with a particular interest—some might say obsession—in the cultural history of radioactivity. 

She is now the Executive Secretary of the British Society for the History of Science. In the past, she has also worked as the Director of the Crime Writers’ Association & for the Gourmet Society, where she was Editor, & at The International Wine & Food Society. This is her first book.