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Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.

Viedt gave a statement to the press. There was “small possibility,” he said, “of the existence of a ‘radium poison’ menace.”1 Speaking of the newly appointed Dr. Flinn, the USRC-employed company doctor, he revealed, “We have engaged persons of the greatest reliability and reputation to conduct an investigation.”2 He told the press that Sarah had been examined by the Life Extension Institute while working for the company and, perpetuating the position taken back in June 1924 when the firm had chosen to ignore the unpublished Drinker report, revealed that “nothing was found in our plant not found among average industrial employees.”3 It was, he said, “absurd to think the same condition could have caused the deaths of Dr. Leman and Sarah Maillefer. The latter could not have handled in one hundred years of her work half the amount of radium Dr. Leman handled in one year. The amounts handled by [Sarah] were so infinitesimal that in the opinion of company officials the work could not be considered as hazardous.”4

Yet those infinitesimal amounts still left a trace—something that Martland was discovering. Sarah’s autopsy was conducted nine hours after her death. She was the first-ever dial-painter to be autopsied; the first radium girl to have an expert examine every inch of her body for clues as to what could have caused her mysterious downfall.

The medical detective made notes as he moved down her silent corpse, working from head to toe. He stretched her mouth wide, looked inside. It was “filled with old, dark, clotted blood.”5 He inspected her left leg, the one she’d been limping on for three years; it was, the doctor noted, four centimeters shorter than her right.

He weighed and measured her internal organs, stripped out her bones to run his tests. He looked inside those bones, into the bone marrow where the blood-producing centers lay. In a healthy adult, the bone marrow is usually yellow and fatty; Sarah had “dark-red marrow throughout [the] entire shaft.”6

Martland was a medical man. He had seen for himself the application of radium to treat cancers in hospital, and he knew how that worked. Radium had three types of rays that it constantly emitted: alpha, beta, and gamma rays. The alpha ray was a very short ray and could be cut off by a thin layer of paper. A beta ray, which had a little greater penetrating power, could be cut off by a sheet of lead. (Modern science says a sheet of aluminum.) The gamma ray was very penetrating, and it was “by its gamma ray” a radium expert said, “you might say it is magic,”7 for the gamma radiation was what gave radium its medicinal value, being able to travel through the body and be directed at a tumor. It was the gamma and beta rays the lab workers protected themselves against with their lead aprons; they didn’t need to worry about the alpha rays, as they could do no harm, being unable to penetrate skin. That was just as well, for alpha rays, which formed 95 percent of the total rays, were “physiologically and biologically intensely more irritating than beta or gamma”8 rays. In other words: the worst kind of radiation.

In Sarah Maillefer’s body, Martland now realized, the alpha rays had not been blocked by a thin sheet of paper or by skin—they were not blocked by anything. The radium was in the very heart of her bones, in close proximity to her bone marrow, which was constantly bombarded by rays from the radioactive deposits. “The distance,” Martland later said, “is approximately one-hundredth of an inch from the blood-forming centers.”9

There was no escaping this most dangerous poison.

Given the extreme power of the alpha rays—those “whirling, powerful, invisible forces, the uses of which we do not yet understand,”10 as von Sochocky had once written—Martland now realized that it didn’t matter that the amount of radium Sarah had worked with was “infinitesimal.”11 From the tests, the doctor estimated that her body contained 180 micrograms of radium, a tiny amount. But it was enough. It was “a type of radiation never before known to have occurred in human beings.”12

He continued his tests. And now he discovered something that no one had ever appreciated before. For he didn’t just test Sarah’s affected jaw and teeth for radioactivity—the site of all the dial-painters’ necroses—he tested her organs, he tested her bones.

They were all radioactive.

Her spleen was radioactive; her liver; her gammy left leg. He found it all over her, but chiefly in her bones, with her legs and jaw having “considerable radioactivity”13—they were the parts most affected, just as her symptoms had shown.

It was an extremely important discovery. Dr. Humphries in Orange had never connected the cases he had seen because the women presented different complaints—why would he have thought that Grace Fryer’s aching back might be connected to Jennie Stocker’s peculiar knee or Quinta McDonald’s arthritic hip? But it was the same thing affecting all the girls. It was radium, heading straight for their bones—yet, on its way, seeming to decide, almost on a whim, where to settle in the greatest degree. And so some women felt the pain first in their feet; in others, it was in their jaw; in others still their spine. It had totally foxed their doctors. But it was the same cause in all of them. In all of them, it was the radium.

There was one final test that Martland now conducted. “I then took from Mrs. Maillefer,” he remembered, “portions of the femur and other bones and placed dental films over them. [I] strapped [the films] all over [her bones] at various places and left them in a dark room in a box.”14 When he’d tried this experiment on normal bones, leaving the films in place for three or four months, he had not got the slightest photographic impression.

Within sixty hours, Sarah’s bones caused exposure on the film: white fog-like patches against the ebony black. Just as the girls’ glow had once done, as they walked home through the streets of Orange after work, her bones had made a picture: an eerie, shining light against the dark.

And from that strange white fog Martland now understood another critical concept. Sarah was dead—but her bones seemed very much alive: making impressions on photographic plates; carelessly emitting measurable radioactivity. It was all due, of course, to the radium. Sarah’s own life may have been cut short, but the radium inside her had a half-life of 1,600 years. It would be shooting out its rays from Sarah’s bones for centuries, long after she was gone. Even though it had killed her, it kept on bombarding her body “every day, every week, month after month, year after year.”15

It is bombarding her body to this day.

Martland paused in his work, thinking hard. Thinking not just of Sarah, but of her sister Marguerite, and of all the other girls he had seen in Barry’s office. Thinking of the fact that, as he later said, “There is nothing known to science that will eliminate, change, or neutralize these [radium] deposits.”16

“Radium is indestructible,” Dr. Knef concurred. “You can subject it to fire for days, weeks, or months without it being affected in the least.”17 He went on to make the damning connection. “If this is the case…how can we expect to get it out of the human body?”18

For years the girls had been searching for a diagnosis, for someone to tell them what was wrong. Once they had that, they believed faithfully, then the doctors would be able to cure them.

But radium poisoning, Martland now knew, was utterly incurable.

Following the results of his tests, Martland shared the proven cause of Sarah’s death. “There is not the slightest doubt,” he wrote, “that she died of an acute anemia, following the ingestion of luminous paint.”19

As hers was the first properly tested case, it became of considerable interest to medical men. Dr. Flinn, the company doctor, immediately wrote to Martland: “Would it be possible for me to get a section of [Mrs. Maillefer’s] tissues, so I can compare them with those of my [laboratory] animals which I am expecting to kill some time in the next few weeks?”20 Dr. Drinker, too, followed the progress of the case with great interest. He had not finished his fight with USRC—because Arthur Roeder had not kept his word.

It was the company lawyer, Josiah Stryker, who had handled the delicate matter of the Drinker report and the Department of Labor. He had taken the report to Roach—but refused to let him retain a copy. “It will be available to [you],” he said airily to Roach, “at any time [in my office].”21 Stryker had left with the report in hand. He added as he went, “If the Department insist on having a copy in their own file, [I will] provide one.”22

Well, the department had insisted; but the company sent it to McBride, Roach’s boss—the man who had been “furious”23 when tenacious Katherine Wiley had intervened in the dial-painters’ cases and rebuked Roach as a result—and not to Roach himself.

When Drinker found out, he was furious. On the day Sarah Maillefer died, he wrote to Roeder: “I am arranging for the immediate publication of [my] report.”24 He was, as the saying goes, planning to publish and be damned. But Stryker was quick with his response: publish and be sued.

Yet if Roeder and Stryker thought they had Drinker pegged, they had thought wrong. One of Drinker’s brothers happened to be a good corporation lawyer. The doctor asked him what he thought of the firm’s threat, and the brother said to “tell ’em to sue and be damned!”25 So Drinker called their bluff.

The Drinker report—first filed on June 3, 1924—would finally be published in August 1925, with a press date of May 25, five days before Hoffman had first read his study, in order to give Drinker precedence on the discovery of the link between the girls’ illnesses and the radioactive paint. Whatever date they put on it, it was published well over a year after being submitted to USRC. Commentators on the case later said, “This report by the Harvard investigators was a scientific document of the greatest importance, not only to remedy conditions in this plant, but to acquaint other manufacturers, using the same radium formula, with its toxicity and potentially lethal effects. Science and humanity alike demanded immediate publication of this report…but [it] was resolutely suppressed.”26

The company had tried to keep everyone in the dark—the Department of Labor, the medical community, the women they had doomed to die. But the light, finally, was flooding in now. The momentum was building for the women’s cause, even as radium’s supporters tried to throw it off-track—and Martland, the girls’ illustrious medical champion, was first in the firing line as pro-radiumites sought to undermine his credibility. William Bailey, the man behind the Radithor tonic, remarked cuttingly, “Doctors, who have never had the slightest experience with radium and know no more about it than a schoolboy, have been trying to garner some publicity by claiming harmful effects. Their statements are perfectly ridiculous!”27 Bailey added that he would happily “take in one dose all the radium used in the factory in one month.”28

USRC, too, was quick to step in, with a spokesman saying dismissively, “Radium, because of the mystery which surrounds much of its activities, is a topic which stimulates the imagination and it is probably this rather than actual fact that has caused the outcry.”29 Roeder weighed in to the debate, claiming publicly that many of the women were “unfit”30 when they started dial-painting and as an excuse had unfairly impugned the firm. It wasn’t even the female victims alone that USRC attacked. A spokesman said that Leman, the chief chemist who had died, “was not in robust health when he began with radium work.”31

Yet the momentum that had begun and was now building—first with Hoffman’s report, then Sarah’s sacrifice, and now the Drinker report too—was unstoppable. Even the commissioner of the Department of Labor, Andrew McBride, who had previously seemed reluctant to intervene, now beat the drum of change. He made a personal visit to the Orange studio and asked why the Drinkers’ safety recommendations had not been put into effect; he was informed that the firm “did not agree with them all, many of them had already been followed, and some were impractical.”32

McBride wasn’t swayed. Now he said that he believed that “human life is far too important to be neglected or wasted if it is possible to conserve it.”33 Consequently, he declared that if the firm did not carry out the Drinkers’ suggestions, “I would issue orders to close their factory…I would compel them to comply or close, no matter at what cost.”34

For those who had long supported the girls, it was a complete turnaround. Karl Quimby, the priest who had offered spiritual comfort to Hazel Kuser, was relieved to observe that, at last, someone in authority was finally taking note. Seeing Dr. Martland’s findings reported widely in the eastern press, he felt moved to write to him: “I can scarcely express to you how gratified I am that you are doing this splendid thing. [I am] wishing you every success and assuring you of the appreciation of a goodly number of people.”35

But it was, of course, the dial-painters themselves for whom the biggest difference was made. Soon after Sarah passed away, Martland carried his testing equipment back into St. Mary’s. It was Marguerite Carlough’s turn to be measured for the radium that the doctor believed was lurking in her bones.

She was in “a terrible condition”36 on the day he ran the tests, with her mouth, as it had always been, the thing that was most agonizing. The alpha rays of the radium, Martland now believed, were slowly drilling those holes into her jawbone. Despite the pain, Marguerite put the breathing tube into her mouth and blew. Just as her sister had done before her, she breathed, as steadily as she possibly could. In…out. On the day Martland ran her tests, the normal leak was 8.5 subdivisions in 50 minutes. (The normal number changed depending on the humidity and other factors.) When he checked Marguerite’s results, they showed 99.7 subdivisions in the same time.

At least, she thought, it would help her legal case.

She had more reason than ever to want to win now: following her sister’s death, the Carloughs had added Sarah’s claim to the litigation. USRC was now fighting three cases: for Marguerite, Hazel, and Sarah. Marguerite was the only one of those three left alive. And so she wanted to do everything she could to help the case; not only for herself, but for her sister. That was something to live for, to strive for, to battle through the pain for. While she was in St. Mary’s, her lawyer, Isidor Kalitsch of Kalitsch & Kalitsch, interviewed her even as she lay in bed, taking her formal testimony so that—whatever happened—he had it to fight the girls’ case.

Yet Hazel, Sarah, and Marguerite weren’t the only girls afflicted. That was something Martland knew—but what he didn’t know was how to contact the others, to get more girls to come forward. Some were ultimately connected to him by their dentists and physicians, but others came to him via a young woman by the name of Katherine Wiley.

“In the midst of my difficulties in the summer of 1925 Miss Wiley again called at our home. This time, she was interested in my own case, for she had heard that I had been ill,” Katherine Schaub later recalled. “[She] suggested that I consult the county medical examiner for an exact diagnosis.”37

Katherine had been troubled by her ailments for a long time by that stage. She had seen what had happened to Irene; she had read what had happened to Sarah. She wasn’t stupid. She knew why Miss Wiley had called on her, and what Dr. Martland thought he would find. To her sister Josephine, she said slowly, “It must be that I have radium poisoning.”38

She tried it out in her mind, like slipping on a new dress. It clung to her, skin-tight: nowhere to hide. It felt most peculiar; not least because Katherine was doing well that summer. She did not appear ill anymore. Her jaw wasn’t troubling her; all the infections in her mouth had cleared up. Her stomach, following her operation, was much improved. “Her general physique was good.”39 She couldn’t have what the others had, she couldn’t; for they had all died, and here she was, still living. Yet there was only one way to be sure. There was only one way to know. Katherine Schaub duly made an appointment with the county physician.

She wasn’t the only one. Quinta McDonald had become increasingly concerned about her own condition of late: her teeth, which she had once considered her best feature, had started loosening in her mouth and then falling out spontaneously, straight into her hand. Ironically, her daughter Helen was losing her milk teeth at the same time. “I can stand the pain,” Quinta later said, “but I do hate to lose my teeth. The upper ones are so loose they merely hang.”40

Following her new trouble, Quinta had started consulting Dr. Knef, the kind dentist who had treated her sister Mollie. Knef had been working with Martland to treat Marguerite; so it was Knef who arranged for Quinta to have Martland’s special tests. And with her came her old friend Grace Fryer, who now had no jaw trouble at all, who was apparently in good health—but whose back hurt worse with every passing day.

One by one they came. Katherine. Quinta. Grace. They weren’t ill like Sarah, or Marguerite, or Dr. Leman. They weren’t at death’s door. They stayed still as Martland scanned their bodies with his electrometer; asked them to breathe into a tube; tested them for the telltale anemia that would betray what was happening inside their bones.

To each he said the same. “He told me,” Grace remembered, “that my system showed the presence of radioactive substances.”41 “He told me,” Quinta said, “that my trouble was all due to the presence of [radium].”42

He told them that there was no cure.

A deep breath was needed for that news. In…out.

“When I first found out what I had,” Grace remembered, “and learned that it was incurable…”43 She trailed off, but eventually continued: “I was horror-stricken…I would look at people I knew and I would say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll never see you again.’”44

They all had that same thought. Quinta, heading home to her children: I’ll never see you again. Katherine, breaking the news to her father: I’ll never see you again.

For Katherine, though, the diagnosis brought relief too. “The doctors told me that [my tests] showed positive radioactivity,” she remembered, “I was not as frightened as I thought I would be. At least there was no groping in the dark now.”45

Instead, there was light. Glowing, glorious light. Shining, stunning light. Light that led their way into the future. “The county medical examiner’s diagnosis,” commented Katherine Schaub with characteristic acumen, “furnished perfect legal evidence for a lawsuit.”46

For too long the women had waited for the truth. The scales, at last, were tipping against the company. The girls had been given a death sentence; yet they had also been given the tools to fight their cause—to fight for justice.

The diagnosis, Katherine Schaub now said, “gave me hope.”47