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“I could hardly sleep the night before…the court hearing,” Katherine Schaub wrote, “for I had been waiting for ages, it seemed, to see this very day.”1

She was not alone. When the five women, on a frosty January day, arrived at the Court of Chancery, they found themselves surrounded. Newspapermen crowded around, flashing cameras in their eyes, and then packed the seats of the gallery inside.

Berry hoped the girls would be ready for what lay ahead. He had prepped them all he could, calling the five women together two days ago to go through their testimony. Yet the women’s mental strength was only part of the equation; and anyone could see that their physical health was failing. The past six months had not been kind to them. “The condition of certain of the girls,” Berry wrote, “is truly deplorable.”2

He was most concerned about Albina Larice. She could not extend her left leg more than four inches; she could not even put on her own shoes and stockings, because she could not bend over. Her medical prognosis, along with Edna Hussman’s, was now deemed the worst. Yet it was not the loss of her health that plagued her…

“I have lost,” Albina mourned, “two children because I’m this way.”3 Only the previous fall, Berry knew from what the doctors had told him, she’d lost a third baby; a baby who, if things had been different, might well have lived. She’d been so delighted when she found out she was pregnant—but Albina’s happiness did not last long. For when her doctors discovered her condition, they would not permit development of the child, due to her health. They ordered her to have a “therapeutically induced”4 abortion.

“I’ve been so discouraged at times,” Albina confided, “that I’ve thought about taking gas and ending it all.”5

Dr. Humphries had said that radium poisoning “destroys [his patients’] will to live.”6 Berry could only hope that the women, on this day, could find the will to fight.

Edna Hussman was the first to give evidence; Louis almost had to carry his wife to the witness stand. His beautiful blond Edna, when seen in snapshot, looked as modelesque as ever, striking a pose with one leg casually crossed in front of the other. But appearances were deceptive: she could no longer move her legs apart, for her hips had locked in place at that “abnormal angle.”7 She had also lost the use of her right arm; she could not even raise it to take the oath.

The judge overseeing proceedings was Vice Chancellor John Backes, a very experienced man in his midsixties. Berry must have been hopeful for a sympathetic hearing, for Backes’s own father had died after being injured in a rolling mill. Backes wore a bushy mustache and glasses; he looked kindly on Edna as she prepared to give her testimony.

Berry eased her in slowly, just as they’d rehearsed. Edna concentrated on him, answering simple questions about where she lived and how she was now a housewife; although, as she said outside the court, “I cannot keep my little home.”8 She explained: “I do what I can, but my husband does most of the work.”9

Edna was tired. “The worst thing I have to put up with is not being able to sleep at night because of the pain in my hips,”10 she revealed. So it didn’t help when, only eight questions in, as she began to outline the nature of her work at USRC, the lawyers for the corporation cut in with the first of their many objections. Berry was expecting it. On January 4, he’d taken another three-hour deposition with the company lawyers present, this time from the Newark dentist Dr. Barry; once again, they’d questioned everything. Irene Rudolph’s dental file had a note that read: “Recovery? OK,”11 which Barry explained meant that she had recovered from the anesthetic; the lawyers, however, said tartly, “Isn’t the ‘Recovery’ here recovery from the treatment?”12

They asked the same question, in different permutations, at least eight times before moving on.

Edna Hussman, however, was not a professional man like Dr. Barry—she was a twenty-six-year-old crippled housewife, and the company lawyers’ aggressive tactics did them no favors. As they harangued her to remember dates and how frequently she had stumbled when her pains began, Backes interrupted their incessant questioning. “Of what importance is it?”13 he asked pointedly. Sympathy for Edna increased as her testimony continued. “I suffer,” she told the court, “all the time.”14

Berry’s inexperience in court sometimes showed itself. Despite his brilliant mind, he was still in the early stages of his trial career—but he found the judge was willing to help him out. When Hoffman took the stand after Edna, Backes assisted Berry by helping him to phrase his questions (“What did he do to get the information and what did he learn?” he prompted) and even stepping in to help when he anticipated an objection.

On their cross-examination of Hoffman, the company lawyers tried the same tactic they’d used with the Drinkers.

“Is this the first time that you had occasion to consider the question of radium necrosis?” Markley asked the statistician, his tall frame pacing the courtroom as he fired off questions.

“Yes, sir; entirely new venture.”

“You had no knowledge, did you?”

“Or nobody else…” pointed out Hoffman.

“I am asking you,” Markley said sternly, “to speak for yourself. [Was this] the first time you ever had anything to do with the subject?”

“Yes, sir,” Hoffman had to agree.

Markley then tried to get Hoffman’s evidence dismissed entirely. “I submit, Your Honor,” he said with a condescending sneer, “that a mere statistician is not qualified in court to pass judgment.”

Yet Markley found that Backes was not playing ball.

“I think he is a little more than that,” retorted the judge. “I think you curbed him down some.”

All this time, the five women watched the drama unfold. They were flanked by the witnesses for the company too; the “chameleon-hued”15 Dr. Flinn sat across from them in the courtroom. Grace felt calm inside, knowing she was up next. “Grace is so accustomed to talking of disease and decay,” wrote a journalist of Miss Fryer, “that she can tell you of these deaths without flickering an eyelash.”16

Still, there must have been a few butterflies as the court sergeant-at-arms tenderly assisted her to the witness stand. This was it, Grace thought. This was her chance to tell her story.

She sat somewhat awkwardly in the chair: her metal back brace chafed her skin and a fresh bandage clung to her jaw, following a recent operation. Yet the slim young woman with neat dark hair and intelligent eyes now composed herself as she began her testimony. “We were instructed to point the brush with our lips,” she said.17

“Did [all the girls] do it that way?” asked Backes.18

“All I ever saw do it,” answered Grace.

“Were you ever told at any time not to put the brush in your mouth?” queried Berry, cutting to the heart of the matter.

“Only on one occasion,” she said. “Dr. von Sochocky was passing through and when he saw me put the brush to my lips he told me not to do it.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said it would make me sick.”

Her answers were concise and informative. She and Berry had an instant repartee, with question and answer flicking back and forth slickly, just as they had planned. Yet Berry gave her room, too, to describe her suffering, so that everyone could hear what the company had done.

“I have had my jaws curetted seventeen times,” said Grace simply, “with pieces of the jawbone removed. Most of my teeth have been removed. [My] spine [is] decaying and one bone in [my] foot [is] totally destroyed.”

It was horrifying to listen to; many in the courtroom were in tears. No wonder, when Markley made some smart comment, the judge snapped back at him. “If I find you guilty, I think you will be sorry,” he said tartly.

Given the warning, Markley approached Grace’s cross-examination with some caution. He could doubtless see, too, that she was not going to be a pushover. And she certainly was not.

Critical to the USRC lawyers’ arguments, particularly in this Court of Chancery, was the statute of limitations and what the girls knew when. If they’d had information prior to July 1925 that their work had made them sick, they should have brought a lawsuit at that time. So Markley tried to push Grace into saying that she had known her work was to blame earlier.

“Did [your dentist] tell you he thought it was your work that was affecting you?” the lawyer asked as he stalked around the court.

“No, sir.”

The question was repeated.

“Why no,” said Grace smartly. “I was working for the Fidelity Union Trust Company when I saw him.”

They also quizzed her on all the different lawyers she had seen. And when they came to Berry, they asked her, “[Was he] the first one you had?”

“No, not the first one,” Grace replied, locking eyes with her young lawyer. “The only one that ever brought suit.”

Katherine Schaub watched proceedings eagerly. “Everything was going along splendidly, I thought,”19 she later wrote. She watched Quinta limp to the stand; the judge, Katherine was gratified to note, was immediately concerned. “I notice you are very lame,” Backes said to Quinta, before Berry had asked a single question. “What is the trouble?”20

“Trouble with my hip—both hips in fact,” Quinta replied. “As to my ankles, I cannot wear a shoe very long; I [have] terrible pains in my knees, one arm and shoulder.”21

Katherine listened attentively. “Tomorrow there would be another court, and the day after, still another,” she wrote, “and so on until the entire case was heard. And then—the court would give its verdict. Then perhaps I could get away from everything and forget.”22 Still half-listening to Quinta, she started to picture her life afterward, how happy she hoped she would be. Just a few more days of these January hearings, she thought, and then it would all be over—one way or the other.

But it was not to be. “I was awakened from my dreaming,” she later said, “by the sound of the vice-chancellor’s gavel hitting the desk. The vice-chancellor was speaking. The next court day, he said, would be April [25]. I could have given way to tears, but tears would not do any good, I knew. I must summon all the courage I had—and fight.”23

Though the delay was galling, the time, in the end, passed quickly. Berry, who was concerned that little was being done for the girls medically, persuaded some New York doctors to admit the women to hospital, and all five spent a month in their care. The physicians believed there might be some treatment devised that would eliminate the radium in the girls’ bones.

“A Russian doctor,” Grace recalled, “thought he could help us with some sort of lead treatment [a treatment used in lead-poisoning cases], but it didn’t seem to take the radium out of our systems. I guess nothing ever will.”24 Perhaps grasping the hopelessness of her situation, Grace summoned Berry and formally drafted her will, even though she didn’t have much to leave to her family.

Despite the failure of the treatment, many of the girls remained positive. “I face the inevitable unflinchingly,” said Quinta. “What else can I do? I don’t know when I will die. I try not to think of the death that is creeping closer, all the time.”25 Death seemed further from Quinta than some of the others, though, as her condition was progressing more slowly than, for example, Albina’s; consequently, it was her habit “to turn aside pity for herself by commiserating [with] her sister’s plight.”26

Many of the women found just being out of Newark in the quiet calm of a hospital made a big difference to their outlook. “I haven’t had anything yet but a bath,” Katherine wrote when they first arrived. “I enjoyed that because someone helped me to take it. A maid is a fine thing to have when you are sick.”27

There was one other bonus to being in New York. As Katherine wrote, they were at last “safe from intrusion [and] safe from the prying eyes of unwelcome advisers.”28

For the omnipresent unwelcome adviser, Dr. Flinn, had not stopped trying to get to them, even though Berry had found him out. Flinn had recently told—and convinced—Dr. Humphries that he was “really a friend of the girls.”29 But the women, now knowing Flinn was a company man, had gone straight to Berry when they’d heard of this; they mistrusted Flinn’s “clandestine overtures,”30 and at their request Berry wrote to Flinn to ask him to desist in what the girls considered harassment. Flinn replied to say that he considered Berry impudent, and concluded that he would not bother to respond to the other inaccuracies of the lawyer’s letter.

The women could not avoid Flinn, however, when on April 22, three days before the trial was to resume, they were summoned to a compulsory examination by the company doctors. Flinn, as well as other specialists, including Dr. Herman Schlundt (who was a “very close personal friend”31 of Vice President Barker), conducted the tests.

Grace flinched as they pricked her with a needle to take her blood. She was constantly afraid of anything that might result in cuts or bruises, for her skin no longer healed. Some dial-painters had “paper-thin skin that literally would split open if simply brushed by a fingernail.”32 A week later, Grace realized she had been right to worry: in the place where the doctors had pricked her, the flesh surrounding the puncture mark was black.

During the examination, radioactivity tests were conducted, the equipment deliberately positioned “so that the table itself was between large portions of the patient’s body and the instrument.”33 Flinn also “held the instrument two to three feet from the subject, allowing the radiation to dissipate before reaching the device.”34 Unsurprisingly, the company’s verdict was that none of the women was radioactive.

But the girls’ case was not finished yet. In three days’ time, they were back on the stand for the fight of their lives.