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Katherine Schaub couldn’t wait for her summer holiday. It had been a horrible twelve months: her cousin Irene dying last July, almost a year ago now, and then Katherine’s own trouble with her teeth starting in November. She knew she was now called a “nervous case”1 by her doctors, but as much as she tried not to think about her situation, it was very hard not to. She had recently taken work in an office with the idea that it would help take her mind off things.

As it turned out, Katherine had become a bit of a flibbertigibbet in her career, flipping from one company to the next, leaving due to ill health, or her nerves, or because she was looking for the next much-needed distraction. She would move from the roller-bearing company to an insurance company to a motorcar firm and back again, never staying in one place especially long, always having to leave for one reason or another. Anyway, wherever it was she was working, most of her earnings had to go on medical treatment.

Her state of mind worried her father, William, she knew. He was so good to her, always trying to lift her spirits or paying one of her doctor’s bills from his own wages. He didn’t earn much—he was a janitor in a factory, and the family lived in a dingy third-floor flat—but he was happy to give all he could to his daughter if it would make her well.

This summer, Katherine planned to take a much-needed rest. She was only twenty-two—an age Irene had never seen, she realized sadly—and she needed to remember what it was to feel young. All this worry was dragging her down.

Yet when July 1924 arrived, Katherine noted: “I could not go away. The condition in my jaw was causing me considerable anxiety and I decided to consult a skilled dental surgeon in New York City; I had to use my vacation money for a new set of x-rays.”2

By chance—although perhaps not, given his standing in his field—she chose to consult Dr. Blum, who was also treating Hazel Kuser. Back in May, Katherine had had another tooth pulled by a different dentist; as was now becoming the distressing norm, the socket had not healed. The infection was agonizing: “The pain [I have] suffered,” she said, “could only be compared with the pain caused by a dentist drilling on a live nerve hour after hour, day after day, month after month.”3 When Blum examined her in July 1924, he “advised work to be done when she is in a physical condition to have it done”4; until then, Katherine had to return home unaided.

It was the not knowing what was wrong that was the worst thing, she thought. “I had stopped at nothing in an effort to regain my lost health, but so far I had failed,” she mused dejectedly. “No one was able to help me.”5

She was at Blum’s office again and again over the summer—not quite the vacation she had planned. Once, she was compelled to obtain an emergency appointment after suffering agonies in the entire right side of her head. She pulled her blond hair back from her thin face in his office, trying to demonstrate to Blum where the pain was, all down the right side of her skull.

Blum gently probed at her swollen jaw. And, upon pressure, pus discharged from the tooth socket. Katherine felt it burst into her mouth, and felt sick. “Why should I be so afflicted?” she would later ask. “I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?”6

On one of her visits to Blum, she ran into Hazel, who was there for treatment too. She was unrecognizable; this mysterious new condition, in some patients, led to grotesque facial swellings, literal footballs of fluid sprouting from their jaws, and it seems Hazel may have been afflicted in this way. Accompanied by her mother, she was in no condition to talk. It was Grace Vincent, having to be her daughter’s voice, who told Katherine that Hazel had been seeing Blum for the past six months.

It could not have been a good advertisement for the dentist’s skills. Before the summer was out, Hazel would be rushed to a hospital in New York, where she would stay for three months, far from her family and Theo in Newark. To pay for her hospital treatment, her husband mortgaged their home to the hilt.

And Hazel and Katherine weren’t the only ones seeing doctors. Back in Orange, Quinta McDonald was finding it harder and harder to look after her little ones. Her daughter Helen was now four years old; baby Robert had just turned one. It was the pain in her hip that was the problem, shooting all down her right leg. She was hobbling about now with more than just a noticeable limp—it was more like a lurch as she stumbled from one foot to the next. It was the strangest thing, but, she said, “It seemed to me that one leg was shorter than the other.”7

She must be imagining it. All the twenty-four years of her life her limbs had measured up straight; why would that suddenly change now?

Nevertheless, it was debilitating, especially with Robert crawling about the house at one hundred miles per hour and her increasingly unable to keep up with him. She made an appointment with Dr. Humphries at the Orange Orthopedic Hospital, perhaps recommended to her by Grace Fryer. In August 1924, Humphries took an x-ray and perused it for analysis. He’d noted in his physical examination of Quinta that she “could not move her hip to complete function,”8 so he was looking especially for a problem around her hip joint.

Ah. There it was. But what was it?

On the x-ray, there was a “white shadow,”9 as Humphries called it. It was peculiar, showing “a white mottling throughout the bone.”10 He had never seen anything quite like it. As John Roach later wrote of the bewildering maladies: “The whole situation is baffling and perplexing…this strange and destructive [force] is an unknown quantity to medical and surgical science.”11

In fact, there was one person who had realized exactly what the problem was—one person, that is, beyond the chemist Dr. Szamatolski, who had long ago identified that “Such trouble as may have been caused is due to the radium.”12 In September 1924, Dr. Blum, having now treated Hazel Kuser for eight months, made an address to the American Dental Association about jaw necrosis. He referenced only Hazel’s case, and merely in a brief footnote, but it was he who made the first ever mention in medical literature of what he now termed “radium jaw.”13 He didn’t believe the company’s protestations of innocence; in fact, fueled by their cold-hearted response when he had begged them to help his patient, he now promised Hazel “all necessary assistance should court action be brought versus the company.”14

One might have thought that this new term—radium jaw—and the dentist’s groundbreaking diagnosis would have captured the imagination of the medical community. But in fact it went entirely unnoticed—by other dentists; by the dial-painters, who were not privy to medical publications; and by physicians, like Dr. Humphries in Orange.

Standing before Quinta McDonald’s x-ray in that summer of 1924, completely at a loss, Humphries nevertheless had to offer a diagnosis to his patient. Quinta remembered, “They told me that I had an arthritic hip.”15

Humphries duly strapped her leg for a month but, unlike with Grace Fryer, there was no improvement. And so, that summer, Quinta McDonald was encased in plaster, from her diaphragm down to her knees, to keep her body absolutely still in the hope that it would mend her troubles. “I could still hobble around,” she said, “with a cane.”16

But hobbling around wasn’t much good for the mother of two young children. It was even harder trying to care for Robert and Helen after that. It is likely that Quinta’s sister Albina—who was still without her own family—helped out; the two sisters now lived some fifteen minutes’ walk away from each other in Orange.

To Quinta’s relief, the dramatic treatment seemed to bear fruit: “That cast eased the pain and helped a little,”17 she remembered. She tried not to think of what was happening beneath the cast, of what she’d started to suspect, that “one leg was beginning to shrivel up and become shorter than the other.”18 The cast stayed on for nine long months. As summer turned into fall and she felt some improvement, she gave thanks that Dr. Humphries’s treatment appeared to have helped her.

It was a time for thanks. On Thanksgiving itself, November 27, Hazel Kuser was finally released from her New York hospital and allowed to return to Newark to be with Theo and her mother Grace. As the family gathered together, they tried to feel the blessing of the fact that at least she was home.

But she wasn’t the same person anymore. She had “suffered so frightfully that her mind seemed affected.”19 Her priest, Karl Quimby, who was attending the family to offer spiritual comfort, said, “She suffered excruciating agony.”20

It was perhaps, then—when they tried to think of Hazel and put her first—the biggest blessing of all when, on Tuesday, December 9, 1924, she finally passed away. She died at 3:00 a.m., at home, with her husband and mother by her side. She was twenty-five. By the time she died, her body was in such a distressing condition that the family would not allow her friends to see it at the funeral.

It was Theo who notified the authorities of her passing; Theo who organized the embalming of her battered body and her burial, on December 11, in Rosedale Cemetery. These were the final things he could do for her, for the woman he had loved since he was a boy.

He didn’t want to think about the future; about the fact that the mortgage on their home had been foreclosed; about the fact that his father had impoverished himself in helping him and Hazel with their bills. By the time she died, Theo Sr. had spent all of his life savings. The family’s bills—for hospitals, x-rays, ambulances, physicians, house calls, medicine, and transport to New York—ran to almost $9,000 ($125,000). They had ruined themselves, and it was all for nothing.

Katherine Wiley, of the Consumers League, who had stayed in touch with the family as she continued to support the dial-painters’ cause, found the situation unbearable. Frustrated that nothing had been done by the authorities, she now pursued two leads. First she wrote to Dr. Alice Hamilton, a brilliant scientist who was considered the founder of industrial toxicology and who always championed the victims of occupational disease; Hamilton was the first-ever female faculty member of Harvard University, and her department chair happened to be one Cecil Drinker.

Hamilton knew nothing of Drinker’s report on the Orange plant, for although Roeder was using it to quash the fears of his employees and to justify the company’s refusal to help the afflicted women, Drinker had not yet submitted it for any official publication. Thus, on receipt of Wiley’s letter, not aware of any conflict of interest, Hamilton enthusiastically expressed the desire that the Consumers League should take up the cases “vigorously—with whatever cooperation I can give you.”21 She wrote, “From what I can hear of the attitude of the company, it is pretty callous.”22 She proposed that perhaps she could undertake her own study as a “special investigator.”23

Wiley’s second line of attack was to reach out to Dr. Frederick Hoffman, a fifty-nine-year-old statistician who specialized in industrial diseases and worked for the Prudential Insurance Company. After reading Wiley’s letter, Hoffman began making inquiries; his first port of call, at Wiley’s urging, was to visit Marguerite Carlough.

It was now almost a year since Marguerite had made that fateful Christmas Eve trip to the dentist. By the time Hoffman visited her in December 1924, he found her “a lamentable case which is lingering between life and death, with apparently no hopeful outlook for the future.”24 He couldn’t help but be moved. Before the year was out, Hoffman, a recognized authority on occupational hazards, had sent a strongly worded letter to President Roeder at USRC. “If the disease in question were compensable, I seriously doubt if your company would escape liability,”25 he wrote pointedly. And he added: “That it will be made compensable in [the] course of time if further cases should arise is self-evident.”26

A warning shot had been fired—and the Orange dial-painters were determined that this would be only the start of it. Marguerite in particular could not stop thinking that she had given her all to that company—and this was how they repaid her. Out in the cold; not a cent to spare to ease her suffering. And not just her; her friends, too.

Though it had been a long time since she had felt like herself, Marguerite could dimly remember how she used to be: a dynamic young woman in sleekly fitted tailored clothes with fabulous millinery. That winter, as the calendar pages turned and the New Year began, she gathered all her courage and what little strength she had left. She asked her family for help, being too weak now to do what she needed. But this was important. This she would do, even if it was her last act on earth.

Against all the odds, Marguerite Carlough found a lawyer to take her case. And on February 5, 1925, she filed suit against the United States Radium Corporation for $75,000 ($1 million).

The dial-painters’ fight back had begun.