فصل 11

11

NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

—1924—

Dr. Barry had never had such a busy January. Patient after patient came through his door, pale hands clutched to thin cheeks, discomfort obvious in the women’s questioning eyes as they asked him what was wrong.

Perhaps worst of all was Marguerite Carlough, who had first come to him on January 2 with evidence of a recent tooth extraction that had begun the process of the jaw necrosis he was seeing in so many girls. Katherine Schaub was back again; the newly married Hazel Kuser was attended by Barry’s partner Dr. Davidson; Josephine Smith, the Orange plant’s forelady, and her sister Genevieve also sought treatment. Genevieve was best friends with Marguerite Carlough and was extremely anxious for her.

In all, to varying degrees, the dentists saw the same mottled condition of the bone. In all, they saw an illness that they knew not how to treat, although they never let the girls see their perplexity; the dial-painters would never have had the audacity to question them anyway. “I felt [Dr. Barry] knew what he was doing,” Katherine later said, “I couldn’t ask him [why my condition didn’t improve].”1 Katherine’s nerves were still very bad; it was as much as she could do to get through the day, let alone ponder on complex medical matters.

For Barry, the sheer number of cases now proved his previous argument that the problem was occupational. He truly believed that phosphorus in the paint was to blame; the symptoms were so like those of phossy jaw that it had to be the issue.

Despite their aching jaws, the Smith sisters were still working in the studio that January. Barry now gave them an ultimatum: quit their jobs or he would refuse to treat them.

Josephine Smith ignored him. Yet, on seeing her friends’ conditions, she did take some precautions at work. When she weighed out the material for her team, she tied a handkerchief over her mouth and nose to avoid inhaling the dust.

Probably because some of the afflicted women were still working in the plant, rumors of Barry’s threats soon reached the ears of the USRC managers—somewhat to their annoyance. Business was going well: President Arthur Roeder’s company had contracts with the U.S. Navy and Army Air Corps, as well as many hospitals and physicians; Undark was by now considered the standard material for government use. Evidently, the firm wanted nothing to get in the way of all these business opportunities. Thus, on hearing of Barry’s gossipmongering, as they probably saw it, they were moved to write to their insurance company in January 1924 to reassure them of the situation: “There recently have been rumors and comments made by individuals, particularly dentists,” they wrote, “in which they claim work in our application department is hazardous and has caused injury and poor health to a former operator of ours [probably Marguerite Carlough] and they are advising that other of our operators should discontinue being in our employ.”2

It may seem striking that the deaths of Mollie Maggia, Helen Quinlan, Irene Rudolph, and Catherine O’Donnell do not feature in this correspondence. But all four women had quit their jobs at the plant well before their deaths, some several years before, and it seems the firm was unconcerned about and possibly ignorant of their deaths. If it had chanced to hear of them, it was only Irene’s case that had been attributed to her work, and as the doctors thought it phossy jaw and the firm knew no phosphorus was in the paint, it could rest easy that the suspicions were unfounded. From their point of view, Irene was an orphan, anyway, whose parents had died young; with a genetic inheritance like that, she was probably never long for this world. As for the others, if anyone at the firm had investigated the mysterious deaths of their former employees, officially Catherine had died of pneumonia, Helen of Vincent’s angina, and as for Mollie Maggia—well, everyone knew she had died from syphilis. The firm had employed over one thousand women during its lifetime; four deaths from such a number was probably to be expected. The company therefore concluded confidently: “We do not recognize that there is any such hazard in the occupation.”3

But, by this time, their former dial-painters disagreed. On January 19, there was a meeting held in Dr. Barry’s office with at least Katherine Schaub, the Smith sisters, and Marguerite Carlough present. The girls talked over their identical conditions with their increasingly concerned dentist. “We discussed employment at the radium plant,” Katherine remembered. “There [was] some talk of industrial disease.”4 The girls agreed “there was something going on about this thing.”5

Yet…what could they do about it? Katherine had already complained to the authorities and nothing had come of it. Even though the evidence pointed to some problem at the plant, no one really knew what the cause was. And much more pressing for the women than the cause, anyway, was searching for a cure—or at least some relief. Their health was their primary concern. Hazel Kuser was by now almost constantly on palliative drugs because her pain was agonizing. Marguerite Carlough had come to Barry hoping for treatment of her jaw—but she was to be disappointed. “I refused to operate [on] the girl,” Barry later said, “for the reason that previous experience [with Irene Rudolph and Katherine Schaub] taught me that the moment there was any operative procedure attempted, the case would flare up and would be much worse than it was at the time I saw her.”6 And so, although the girls were wracked by pain from their teeth, he refused to remove them. All he could offer the panicked women was to keep them under observation.

He couldn’t see what else he could do. He did ask others for help, consulting a highly skilled Newark physician, Dr. Harrison Martland. But when Martland examined the girls, he too was puzzled. “After seeing several girls in the dental office,” Martland later wrote, “I lost interest in the matter.”7

The girls were on their own.

Just down the road at the Orange Orthopedic Hospital, Grace Fryer wasn’t having much more luck. Just as she’d promised her parents, she had kept her appointment with Dr. Robert Humphries to have her painful back and foot examined. Humphries was the head doctor at the hospital, an “exceedingly high-grade man.”8 A Canadian in his forties, Humphries listened carefully to Grace’s complaints and then diagnosed muscle-bound feet and chronic arthritis. He strapped her up for several weeks but noted with concern that there was very little improvement.

Humphries was treating another young woman that spring by the name of Jennie Stocker. He didn’t connect her with Grace Fryer, who worked in a bank, but Jennie had been a dial-painter until 1922, and she and Grace had worked together during the war. She had “a very peculiar condition of the knee”9 that had been mystifying Humphries ever since he had taken her case.

So many doctors across New Jersey were confused that first month of 1924—but they didn’t share notes, and so each case was viewed in isolation. As January drew to a close, Theo and Hazel Kuser decided that they would look elsewhere for treatment. New Jersey was just a short distance from New York City, where some of the best doctors and dentists in the world had their practices. On January 25, Hazel, bravely swallowing down her pain, made the journey into the Big Apple for treatment at the office of Dr. Theodore Blum.

Blum was one of America’s first oral surgeons, a prestigious specialist who had pioneered the use of x-rays for dental diagnosis. His fees were extortionate, but Theo insisted that they visit him anyway. He could borrow money on their furniture to pay the bills, he reasoned. If it eased Hazel’s pain, if Dr. Blum could stop this endless decay in her mouth, then it would all be worth it.

As a mechanic, Theo Kuser was not wealthy, and nor was his family; his father, also called Theo, was a postman. Theo Sr. had saved up money to buy a house for his old age, but he now offered some of his savings to his son for Hazel’s treatment. He took it gratefully, and the appointment was duly attended.

Blum was a balding man with a neatly trimmed mustache, spectacles, and a high forehead. As he introduced himself to Hazel and began his examination, he quickly realized that he had never seen a condition like hers before. Her face was swollen with “pus bags,”10 but it was the condition of her jawbone that was most perplexing: it seemed almost “moth-eaten.”11 It literally had holes in it.

But what, Dr. Blum now pondered, could have caused it?

Blum was worth his money. Later, he would try to find out the exact chemicals in the luminous paint, although to no avail. For now, he took a medical and employment history from Hazel and made a provisional diagnosis: she was suffering from “poisoning by a radioactive substance.”12 He admitted her to the Flower Hospital in New York to operate on her jaw. It would be the first, but not the last, of such procedures Hazel had to endure.

Yet although Blum had offered a diagnosis, and swift and specialist treatment, he didn’t offer the one thing that Theo had been yearning for: hope. That was all he really wanted, to know that there was light at the end of the tunnel; that they could get through this and come out the other side into a shining day, and another one, and another day after that.

Instead, Blum told him “there is little chance of recovery.”13 All the money in the world couldn’t save his wife now.

The radium girls’ agony hadn’t gone unnoticed in the community. That same month, a civic-minded resident wrote to the Department of Labor to raise concerns about the Orange plant. This time, it was John Roach’s boss, Commissioner Andrew McBride, who stepped in, grilling health officer Lenore Young on what she’d found out the previous summer. She apologized for seeming “negligent,”14 interviewed the affected girls and then recommended that the Public Health Service be called in.

Yet McBride felt there was not sufficient evidence to warrant doing so. His reasoning may have been political, for the Department of Labor was pro-business. Under state law, it had no authority to stop an industrial process even if it was harmful. As a result of these factors, the department now gave the plant a clean bill of health—and completely stopped looking into the dial-painters’ illnesses. They made this decision even though more and more women were suffering the same symptoms.

It was a stalemate. No diagnosis. No clue as to the cause. No one lifting a finger to find out what was really going on in that radium studio in Orange.

But then the stalemate was ended by an unexpected source: the United States Radium Corporation itself.

As more and more girls fell ill, the company found that—in a stark contrast to the glory days in the war—it was encountering “considerable difficulty”15 recruiting staff: a number of the girls had quit, and no one wanted to replace them; production was now being held up. When Genevieve Smith—shocked into action by her best friend Marguerite’s decline—also handed in her resignation on February 20, 1924, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Viedt, the vice president, was ordered to find out why Genevieve was leaving, and she cited Dr. Barry’s ultimatum; the dentist was persisting with his outlandish claims.

The lack of operators was a big concern to the company, but there was another worrying development about the same time that really made them sit up and take note of what was happening to their former employees. For more than three years, Grace Vincent, Hazel’s mother, had been watching her daughter suffer. Hazel was in constant agony; no mother could bear it. Dr. Blum had said there was no hope now, and Mrs. Vincent had nothing to lose. She went down to the studio in Orange and left a letter there. In it, she told the firm “she was about to make [a] claim for compensation on account of [her daughter’s] illness.”16

That got their attention.

At once, Viedt reported these developments to the New York headquarters. Not long after, USRC executives decided to launch an investigation to determine if there was anything dangerous in the work. For too long there had been rumor and suspicion; it couldn’t continue. After all—now, it was bad for business.