فصل 07

7

NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

—November 1922—

“Miss Irene Rudolph?”

Irene got tentatively to her feet as she heard her name being called by Dr. Barry and shuffled into his office. Her trouble had first started in her feet, though they were currently the least of her worries; she could just about get by if she took things slow. Her family, including her cousin Katherine Schaub, helped out a lot. It was now her mouth that was the real problem.

She had been attending this dental practice since August, though she’d been having tooth trouble since the spring of 1922. Despite the attentions of various dentists, her condition had worsened, so much so that, in May, she’d had to give up her job in a corset factory. Without a job, yet with increasing medical bills, Irene soon found her financial position precarious. She’d been sensible when she’d worked as a dial-painter, squirreling away her high wages, but her mysterious condition had exhausted her hard-earned savings.

With every expensive appointment, she hoped for improvement. As she levered herself into Dr. Barry’s chair, she opened her mouth wide and prayed that, this time, he would have good news to offer.

Walter Barry, an experienced dentist of forty-two, examined Irene’s mouth with deepening confusion. He and his partner, Dr. James Davidson, had been operating on Irene since the summer. Yet every course of treatment they tried, such as cutting out the diseased bone in her mouth and removing teeth, seemed only to increase her suffering. Their surgery was located at 516 Broad Street, practically opposite the Newark Public Library, yet it appeared no textbook or medical journal on the shelves of the library or their own practice contained the solution. As Barry examined Irene’s butchered mouth at this latest appointment, on November 8, 1922, he could see that, still, there was only more infection, inflaming her empty gums with an unhealthy yellow sheen.

James Davidson had experience of treating phossy jaw, and he and Barry now became convinced this was Irene’s trouble. “I immediately started to question [Irene] as to what [her] occupation was,” Barry recalled. “I made an effort to ascertain whether there was any phosphorus in this material she was using.”1

Unknowingly, he was following in the footsteps of Dr. Knef, who had treated Mollie Maggia—but the two investigations didn’t cross, nor did Knef have opportunity to share his own discovery: how Mollie’s jaw was destroyed faster and faster, the more of her he removed. The same accelerated decline was now affecting Irene.

Barry told his patient it was his opinion she was suffering from “some occupational trouble.”2 But as Katherine Schaub later noted, “The word radium was never brought into it.”3 Radium was such an established medical boon that it was almost beyond reproach; people didn’t question it. And so, although there was some suspicion that the luminous paint was to blame for Irene’s condition, culprit number one was phosphorus.

In December, Irene took a turn for the worse and was admitted to the hospital. She was shockingly pale and found to be anemic. And it was in the hospital that she decided she was not going to lie down and suffer quietly.

For although Irene’s dentists may not have crossed paths with Knef, the dial-painters’ friendships were a stronger network. By now, Irene had heard about Mollie Maggia’s death. The gossipmongers were saying syphilis had killed her, but the girls who knew her found that hard to believe. And so, while in the hospital, Irene told her doctor that there had been another girl, who’d had symptoms just like hers, who’d died only a few months before. The Maggia family were trying to move on with their lives without their sister—that winter, Quinta was pregnant again, and Albina was hoping that any month now she would have the same good news to announce—but for Irene, sitting weakly in her hospital room, Mollie’s death was definitely not something in the past, but somehow horribly present.

And then she told the doctor something else. Another girl, she said, was sick.

She could have meant Helen Quinlan, who had been taken ill with a severe sore throat and swollen face, which had inflamed her pixie features. She, too, had had trouble with a tooth and was beginning to show signs of anemia. But Helen appears not to have moved in the same social circles as Irene; it was Hazel Vincent to whom she referred.

Since Hazel had left USRC, she had become more and more ill. She had been told that she was suffering from anemia and pyorrhea; her doctor, too, suspected phossy jaw from the black discharge with its “garlic odor”4 oozing from her mouth and nose. Hazel’s childhood sweetheart, Theo, was worried sick about her.

In Irene’s opinion, Hazel’s case and hers were just too similar to be discounted as mere coincidence. Carefully, she set out the parallels during a consultation with Dr. Allen at the hospital, trying to make him see that there was something more going on. And as the doctor listened to his patient talk, he’d heard enough. All the evidence suggested that it was an occupational problem. On December 26, 1922, Allen reported Irene Rudolph as a case of phosphorus poisoning to the Industrial Hygiene Division—and asked them to investigate. The authorities launched straight into action, and within days an inspector was at the Orange plant looking into the claims of industrial poisoning.

The inspector was escorted up to the dial-painting studio by Harold Viedt, a vice president of USRC who had responsibility for operations. Together, they quietly observed the girls at work. There were not many of them there—dial-painting in Orange had become almost a seasonal occupation, so the girls did not work continuously anymore—yet the inspector noted with some incredulity the universal practice of lip-pointing. This was called to the attention of Mr. Viedt, who was quick to address the concerns. Viedt told him, the inspector reported, that “he has warned [the girls] time and time again of this dangerous practice, but he could not get them to stop it.”5

Had the dial-painters overheard this conversation, they would probably have been stunned. Other than Sabin von Sochocky’s one-off warning to Grace Fryer that lip-pointing would make her ill, not a single other dial-painter, including the instructresses and forewomen, ever reported a warning being issued and certainly not one that included reference to lip-pointing being a “dangerous practice.” On the contrary, they had received countless assurances of the exact opposite—when the company deigned to concern itself with their work processes, that was. On the whole, the firm left them to get on with their work without interference. It didn’t, in truth, really seem to care just how the women dial-painted, as long as the material wasn’t wasted and the work got done.

The inspector continued to observe the girls. One, he noticed, a rather matronly woman who was older than the rest, appeared to be limping as she carried her dials up to the new forelady, Josephine Smith, who had recently been promoted; Miss Rooney would be leaving to join the Luminite Corporation.

Sarah Maillefer was limping. She was getting old, she supposed; she was now thirty-three, and you should expect a few more aches and pains as you got older. Plus, it was exhausting being a working mother. She didn’t have the energy to keep up with her sister Marguerite, let alone her eleven-year-old daughter. She felt blessed that the company was so understanding about her limp; “a foreman of the company [took] her to and from work each day because of this trouble.”6

The inspection concluded with the official taking a paint sample for testing; he sent it to John Roach, the deputy commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor, with a recommendation that Roach’s team “make a survey of this plant as it is outside our jurisdiction.”7 Consequently, an additional inspection took place in the next few weeks, with the inspector, Lillian Erskine, delivering her findings to Roach on January 25.

Erskine took a rather different approach from the first inspector. As part of her investigation, she spoke with a radium authority and informed Roach that “no reports of necrosed bones as a result of radium treatment exist.” She therefore concluded: “This case [Irene Rudolph] and the reported second case [Hazel Vincent] are probably an accidental coincidence, resulting from abscessed teeth and incompetent dental surgery.”8

Roach arranged for the paint to be tested by Dr. Martin Szamatolski, a chemist. Szamatolski was an educated man, and thought it extremely unlikely any phosphorous would be in the paint, as this had never been hinted at as an ingredient. Without having run a single test, he wrote sagely to Roach on January 30, 1923: “It is my belief that the serious condition of the jaw has been caused by the influence of radium.”9

This was a radical idea—yet Szamatolski’s off-the-wall suggestion did have some science to back it up. In a bibliography of radium studies that USRC itself had published just four months before, there was an article headed “Radium Dangers—Injurious Effects.” In fact, the bibliography contained articles as far back as 1906 on the damage radium could cause. The company later conceded in an internal memo that there were a “considerable”10 number of articles dealing with the hazards from the early twentieth century. A woman had even died in Germany in 1912 after being treated with radium; her doctor had said “one cannot doubt for a moment”11 that radium poisoning was the cause.

Yet the flip side of the coin was all the positive literature about radium. As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing—the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving.

But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.

Szamatolski’s opinion, therefore, was a lone, unheard, and hypothetical voice, set against the flamboyant roar of a well-funded campaign of pro-radium literature. Szamatolski himself, however, was a conscientious as well as smart man. Given his tests would take a few months, and mindful of the fact that work was continuing in the dial-painting studio, he took care to add a special note to his letter of January 30. Though his radical theory had not yet been proven, he wrote plainly, “I would suggest that every operator be warned through a printed leaflet of the dangers of getting this material on the skin or into the system, especially the mouth, and that they be forced to use the utmost cleanliness.”12 Yet, for some reason, this did not happen. Perhaps the message was never passed on.

Perhaps the company chose to ignore it.

As 1923 drew on and Szamatolski ran his tests, Irene Rudolph, who had been sent home from the hospital, continued to endure the horrific ulcers and sores that had tortured Mollie Maggia. Irene’s anemia grew more serious, as did Helen Quinlan’s. They were pale, weak creatures, with no energy to them, no life. Doctors treated them first for one thing and then another—but not a single treatment helped.

And they weren’t the only ones who were sick. Since George Willis, the cofounder of the Orange radium firm, had been ousted from his company, things had deteriorated for him. It seemed a long time ago that he had thoughtlessly carried tubes of radium with his bare hands every day at work—but all time is relative. With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium could take its time to make itself known.

As the months had passed since his departure from the company, Willis had sickened, and in September 1922, the same month Mollie Maggia died, he’d had his right thumb amputated; tests revealed it was riddled with cancer. Willis didn’t keep his sickness to himself; instead, he published his findings. In February 1923, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), he wrote: “The reputation for harmlessness enjoyed by radium may, after all, depend on the fact that, so far, not very many persons have been exposed to large amounts of radium by daily handling over long periods… There is good reason to fear that neglect of precautions may result in serious injury to the radium workers themselves.”13

What his former company thought of his article is not recorded. They probably dismissed it: he didn’t work for them anymore; thus, he did not matter. And they weren’t the only ones to ignore it. No one, it seemed, took much notice of the small article in the specialist publication.

By the April of 1923, Szamatolski had completed his tests. As he had suspected, there was not a single trace of phosphorus in the luminous paint.

“I feel quite sure,” he therefore wrote on April 6, 1923, “that the opinion expressed in my former letter is correct. Such trouble as may have been caused is due to the radium.”14