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ORANGE, NEW JERSEY

—February 1933—

Katherine Schaub bit down hard on her lip to keep from crying out, her eyes squeezing shut with the pain.

“All done,” the nurse likely said reassuringly, having changed the dressing on Katherine’s knee.

Katherine opened her eyes warily, not wanting to look down at her leg. All through the past year, doctors had been keeping tabs on her tumor: it was 45 centimeters, they told her; 47 and a half; 49. Its earlier reduction had been reversed. In the past week or so, the bone tumor had broken through her paper-thin skin; now, the lower end of her femur was sticking out of the wound. She tried to focus her mind on happier things. Before she’d been admitted to the hospital, she had spent some time at a private sanatorium, Mountain View Rest, for her nerves, and that had been quite wonderful. She had finished writing her memoir; had even had an excerpt of it published in a social reformers’ magazine. She, Katherine Schaub, was a published author: it was what she had always longed to be. “I have been granted,” she wrote with peaceful pleasure, “[a] priceless gift—I have found happiness.”1

If only she could have stayed in the mountains; she felt so much brighter there. Yet as her health worsened and she’d had to take regular taxis into Orange to see Dr. Humphries, the board of doctors had balked at paying the bills. In fact, they’d had enough of the women’s expenses altogether.

The previous February, 1932, Katherine, Grace, Edna, and Albina had all received a no-nonsense letter from Dr. Ewing: “We wish to inform you that no bills will be approved by the Commission for any services which have not been specifically approved by Dr. Craver. The Commission feels that they must scrutinize expenses more carefully.”2 The board now refused to cover medicines “we do not feel are useful,”3 routine doctors’ visits, and home nurses; the latter was a service the women increasingly relied on to help clean and dress themselves. The board was acting, it said, “to prevent this ‘exploitation’ of the radium corporation.”4

There had been fallout from the committee’s decision. For Katherine, it made her even more determined not to submit to their experiments: “I have suffered my share…I don’t think that I should be at the mercy of these New York doctors.”5 The physicians moaned heartily about her behind her back: “[She is] one of the most difficult patients to handle,” complained one. “I am really at a loss what to do with this highly hysterical woman.”6

Katherine’s suspicion of medical men appears to have made her nervous of accepting any therapeutic advice. Dr. Humphries recommended a leg amputation, but she refused. “I have made no headway with her,” Humphries wrote, “and doubt very much being able to do so.”7 Katherine could be as stubborn as a mule when she wanted to be; it was perhaps partly why she had been one of the five girls who’d won a settlement from USRC in the first place.

Ewing’s letter had mentioned “the very depressed state of business”8 as a reason for the withdrawal of expenses. Inevitably, as the economy crumbled, sales of radium watches declined along with everything else. But it wasn’t only that which was now sucking the dollars from the firm’s bank account. It was the case of Eben Byers.

It had been all over the papers last March. Byers was a world-renowned industrialist and playboy; a wealthy man who raced horses and lived in a “magnificent home”9: he was high-profile and important. After Byers had received an injury back in 1927, his doctor had prescribed Radithor; Byers was so impressed with it he consumed several thousand bottles.

When his story made the news, the headlines read: THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTIL HIS JAW CAME OFF.10 Byers had died of radium poisoning on March 30, 1932, but before he died he gave evidence to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that Radithor had killed him.

The authorities reacted with much more alacrity than they had in the cases of the dial-painters. In December 1931, the FTC issued a cease-and-desist order against Radithor; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would go on to declare radium medicines illegal. Finally, the American Medical Association removed the internal use of radium from its list of “New and Nonofficial Remedies,” where it had remained even after the discovery of the dial-painters’ deaths. It seemed wealthy consumers were much more worthy of protection than working-class girls; after all, dial-painting was still going on, even in 1933.

Katherine had read the stories about Byers with sadness for the victim, but also an overwhelming sense of vindication. Radium was a poison. The girls knew it, intimately, but until the Byers case, public opinion had swung the other way. Indeed, with four of the famous radium girls still alive—almost five years on from their case—there had been much muttering that their lawsuit had been nothing more than a fraudulent scheme to get money from the company.

For that company, the Byers case was a disaster. USRC supplied the radium for many of the products that had now been banned. The whole radium industry collapsed. It may or may not have been connected, but in August 1932, having failed to find a buyer for the old Orange plant, the firm had it razed to the ground. The dial-painters’ studio was the last building to come down.

The women had mixed feelings, seeing it gone. It was a bittersweet triumph of sorts; except, for them, erasing the studio and all it had done was not as simple as covering the site with anonymous asphalt. Lying in her hospital room in February 1933, Katherine Schaub forced herself to look at what the radium had done to her. Her leg was a mess. Finally, after much consideration, she decided to have it amputated.

It was a decision for her future. “It is my ambition to continue writing,”11 she said. She could do that, she thought, with or without a leg.

But Humphries had bad news for her. “There is no question of an amputation,”12 he now said. Katherine and her leg had worsened of late and both were now in far too serious a state for such a major operation to be performed. Subsequently, Katherine took another slide downhill. On February 18, 1933, at 9:00 p.m., she died at the age of thirty.

Two days before her funeral, perhaps distracted by grief, her beloved father, William, fell down a flight of stairs at his Newark home. He was rushed to the hospital, but just one week after Katherine died, she was joined on the other side by her dad. His funeral was held in the same church as Katherine’s, and they were both buried in the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. They were together, in the end, at the close of Katherine’s long journey—of her “adventure,”13 as she herself put it.

Katherine Schaub was just fourteen when she’d started work with the radium company on that long-ago February day. She had dreamed of writing and of fulfilling her potential—and she did publish her work and she did fulfill that potential; it was just that her destiny was not quite the one she’d dreamed of as a girl. In taking on the company, she became a celebrated example of standing up for your rights.