

One of the products was removal of unwanted hair. You radiated and the hair just fell off! How practical!
To be fair to the radium people, I don’t think the correlation between radiation and cancer was established until the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still one could see hair falling of as a warning sign of sorts.
FWIW, I think he’s wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.
I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it’s language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.
If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.
I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.