فصل 21

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Albina Larice didn’t suffer from the same aching pains as her sister Quinta: the arthritic hips, the loose teeth. She’d once had a rheumatic knee, shortly before she’d married James, but, she said, “I got rid of that; it never bothered me anymore.”1 Yet just two weeks after her baby was stillborn at St. Mary’s, as though her body was breaking to match her heart, severe pain appeared in her limbs, and her left leg began to shorten. In October 1925, as her family doctor’s treatment had brought no relief, Albina consulted Dr. Humphries at the Orthopedic Hospital. It was there, as she overheard the doctors talking about her, that she heard one of them remark that she was a radium case.

It was shock after shock, trouble after trouble. “I am,” Albina later said, “so unhappy.”2

As the doctors had done with Quinta, they encased her in plaster for four months, hoping it would help her improve. But Albina didn’t feel any benefit. “I know,” she murmured dejectedly, “I’m getting weaker, weaker, weaker…”3

Along the corridor from her in the hospital was another former dial-painter. Edna Hussman, the girl once nicknamed the Dresden Doll, had been seeing doctors since September 1925, apparently for rheumatism; when their treatments didn’t help, she’d sought out Humphries.

Her trouble had begun back in July. “I first started,” she later said, “with these here pains in my hip. When I would be walking, I would get these sharp pains, and I would stumble. [It happened] nearly every time I would walk. I just limped along, held on to different things around the house to get around; that is the only way I could get around.”4

Humphries, who noted that Edna’s left leg was an inch shorter than her right, took an x-ray. Edna had walked to the hospital with the help of her husband, Louis, so he didn’t think she could be too badly hurt. But when he assessed the picture, he had to think again: her leg was broken. She’d broken her leg when she stumbled, yet, since the stumble was a slight stumble and not a fall, she had not realized she was so badly injured.

Humphries remembered of Edna’s case: “She had a spontaneous fracture of the neck of the femur [thigh bone]—and that doesn’t occur in young people as a rule. I have never seen a young woman with [such] a fracture occurring spontaneously.”5

Never—until now.

“By that time,” Humphries went on, “we knew she was working in the radium plant and we were beginning to get wise to something unusual happening to these cases. [But] her x-rays did not show any white shadow or anything but a fracture.”6

It was not radium poisoning. It backed up what Dr. Flinn had told Edna when he’d examined her. While she might not be able to walk anymore, Flinn had assured her just a short time ago that she was in perfect health. So she must be OK.

Due to her x-ray, Humphries simply treated her for a broken leg. “They put me in a plaster cast,” Edna remembered, “and I was laid up for a whole year in this here plaster cast.”7 Louis took her back to their little bungalow and their small white dog, and life went on.

Flinn, too, continued on with his work. He had come across a treasure trove of information, supplied to him unwittingly by Katherine Wiley. “I went to see Dr. Flinn,” Wiley later recalled, “and found him most interested. He said that he would be glad to have the names and addresses of all the sick girls that I knew.”8

Wiley wasn’t aware that Flinn was working for USRC, for he did not disclose that information. Nor did she know that the firm had “asked Dr. Flinn to see these girls and to give medical advice.”9

And so, with Flinn now having her home address, on December 7, 1925, Katherine Schaub received a letter.

“My dear Miss Schaub,” Dr. Flinn wrote, on the headed paper of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, “I wonder if you would be kind enough to either come to my office or if you prefer to my house in South Orange and let me give you an unbias [sic] opinion…”10

But Katherine Schaub, in “a terrible nervous state,”11 was in no condition to see Dr. Flinn. “I was ill when I received the letter,” she remembered, “I was in bed and I could not go out.”12

She wrote back to explain her predicament, as Flinn recalled: “I never replied to [her] letter,” he said, “as I told my technician that if she wasn’t willing to come either to my home or my office I certainly wasn’t going to put myself out; a girl of that class didn’t appreciate it when you did try to aid her.”13

Flinn wasn’t bothered about being unable to examine Katherine, for he had plenty of other avenues to explore; he later boastfully said, “I [have] examined practically every girl now working in this industry.”14 With his contacts at USRC, Luminite, and the Waterbury Clock Company—to name a few of the firms who had engaged him—he now had unprecedented access to the dial-painters. However, despite his boast, he doesn’t seem to have examined many ex-employees.

If he had, he might have discovered that a second Waterbury girl, Elizabeth Dunn, had recently been taken ill. She’d left her dial-painting job earlier in 1925 (whether before or after Flinn started his study is not clear) after a simple slip on a dance floor had left her with a broken leg—what might be called a spontaneous fracture. Had Flinn discovered her case—or the death of her former colleague, Frances Splettstocher—it would have been crucial evidence that the dial-painters’ illnesses went beyond the Orange plant and were caused by their occupation.

Flinn was also busy discrediting the work of Dr. Martland. In December 1925, Martland, another doctor called Conlon, and the girls’ dentist Dr. Knef published a joint medical study based on their work with the women that year. Their conclusion was that this was “a hitherto unrecognized form of occupational poisoning.”15 The article became, in time, a classic example of a medical mystery solved.

In 1925, however, with this being such a pioneering statement, no such respect was shown. Martland’s conclusions were so radical that they were disputed fiercely, and not just by Flinn. A radium-medicine specialist, Dr. James Ewing, commented drily at a meeting of the New York Pathological Society: “We are a long way from speaking of the ill effects of radium therapy.”16

He might have been—but Martland certainly wasn’t. In fact, Martland singled out the medicinal use of injected or ingested radium as dangerous and stated that “none of the known radioactive substances produce any curative results.”17

That was a red rag to the bullish radium men. This wasn’t just about some dial-painters dying; Martland was now attacking a hugely lucrative industry. “The original [study was] ridiculed by most authorities on radium,” Martland remembered later. “I have been under constant attack for my efforts to protect the public and to secure some compensation for disabled, death-facing girls. Manufacturers of radium have been particularly active and insulting in their efforts to discredit me.”18

It was with good reason, as far as the radium companies were concerned. A letter from the Radium Ore Revigator Company told the doctor that his article had “automatically reduced our sales [to] less than half our previous quarter.”19

Yet it wasn’t just those with a financial stake in the beneficence of radium who had their doubts. Even the American Medical Association—which in 1914 had formally included radium on its list of “New and Nonofficial Remedies”—was skeptical. It all made the girls’ claims look increasingly suspicious to the lawyers they contacted for help.

This public reception to Martland’s work could not have pleased USRC more. Soon they would be fighting back with medical studies of their own; Vice President Barker wrote in a memo with almost undisguised glee, “Our friend Martland [is] still maintaining that we are killing [the dial-painters] off by the [dozen]; [his] article is some of their propaganda. [Yet] I understand Flinn’s report is to be published soon. His findings have been entirely negative and I think his report represents a very good piece of work.”20 He added, “I am rather inclined to think that he will be given a certain amount of money to continue his work.”21

Flinn was just the ticket as far as the company was concerned. USRC, no doubt, would have been aghast to learn what Flinn had written to their former investigator, Dr. Drinker. “Though I am not saying it out loud,” Flinn wrote, “I cannot but feel that the paint is to blame for the girls’ conditions.”22

But while the scientists publicly fought over the cause of the girls’ disease, there was one woman who was in its clutches, still fighting for all she was worth. Marguerite Carlough had been “half dead”23 for weeks. In Hoffman’s opinion, hers was “the most tragic [case] on record.”24 With her immune system dangerously weakened, she contracted pneumonia on top of everything else. But she managed to make it home for Christmas, to spend it with her niece and mom and dad. It was two years since that Christmas Eve when she’d had her tooth pulled, and all this trouble had begun. It was six months since her sister Sarah had passed away.

In the early hours of Boxing Day 1925, at the age of twenty-four, Marguerite followed her sister to that undiscovered country. She died at home on Main Street at 3:00 a.m. Her bones, Martland later said, showed “beautiful concentrations”25 on the x-ray films that he wrapped around her in death.

Two days later, for the second time in six months, her parents laid to rest a daughter in the peaceful quiet of Laurel Grove Cemetery. Yet Marguerite had not died quietly: as the first dial-painter to file suit—the first to show it was even possible to fight back against the corporation that killed her—she went out with a roar.

It was a sound that would echo long afterwards: long after she died; long after she was buried; long after her parents made their slow way home from her funeral, and closed their door against the world.