The Radium Girls: Chapters 10–16

At the end of their visit, Katherine Drinker informed Roeder that a one-day tour was not long enough for an in-depth investigation. So over two more days, from May 7 to 8, 1924, the Drinkers returned to make a comprehensive study of the plant.

They couldn’t help but notice that he had dreadful lesions on his hands.

“There seemed to be,” Cecil Drinker later wrote, “an utter lack of realization of the dangers inherent in the material which was being manufactured.”

Roeder even told him that radium-induced lesions could never develop into malignant tumors, a statement the Drinkers knew was untrue.

But the judge told her bluntly that the women could not be helped under the New Jersey laws.

In addition, the law had a five-month statute of limitations, which meant any legal claim had to be filed within five months of the person being hurt.

The judge told Wiley that even if a new law was passed to help the women, it would not be retroactive. In other words, it would only apply to women who were hurt after the law was passed and not those who had gotten sick beforehand.

Wiley wasn’t daunted one bit by McBride’s anger, however. She continued to argue with him that action was required.

“He tells everyone,” an observer commented, “he is absolutely safe because he has a report exonerating him from any possible responsibility in the illness of the girls.”

“I had stopped at nothing in an effort to regain my lost health, but so far I had failed,” Katherine wrote dejectedly.

“Why should I be so afflicted?” Katherine would later ask, and she could have been speaking for all the radium girls.

On the X-ray, there was a “white shadow,” as Humphries called it. It was peculiar, showing a white mottling throughout the bone.

As John Roach later wrote of the bewildering maladies, “The whole situation is baffling and perplexing...This strange and destructive [force] is an unknown quantity to medical and surgical science.”

In September 1924, Dr. Blum made an address to the American Dental Association about jaw necrosis. (Necrosis meant decay or death of living tissue. It was the technical term that dentists used to describe the aggressive destruction of the dial-painters’ jawbones.)

Fordyce knew that Kjaer was about to inspect the Ottawa studio, and Fordyce asked him to be discreet while there, “so as not to cause an alarm among the workers.”

She told him that the girls had been warned “not to tip the brushes in the mouths without washing them carefully first in the water provided.” But she conceded, “Tipping in the mouth is constantly practiced.”

The publicity had been horrendous, with his company’s name dragged through the mud as this little upstart charged that the firm had hurt her.

Hoffman planned to publish his report, probably before the influential American Medical Association.

A troubled look crossed Arthur Roeder’s affluently rounded face.

They dismissed each ingredient in turn as nontoxic—except for radium. At radium, they declared there was ample evidence of the dangers.

Now imagine the impact of it once it had craftily concealed its way inside your bones.

It was radium, making itself at home in Hazel Kuser, that had eaten away at her skull until her jawbones had holes riddled right through them.

Since Roeder was the person who’d commissioned the study, Drinker felt it was not right to publish it without Roeder’s say-so.

And his opinion was this: “The women were slowly poisoned as a result of introducing into the system minute quantities of radioactive substance.”

They thought that the radium stimulated the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells, which was a good thing for the body.

He concluded emphatically, “We are dealing with an entirely new occupational affection demanding the utmost attention.”

She was valiantly campaigning to have radium necrosis added to the list of compensable diseases.

As Alice Hamilton noted with dismay, “Miss Carlough may not live till then.”

Unwittingly, Hoffman had stumbled on the reason for that, but didn’t realize it.

They called out to give him some air, for the trolley car to stop. A kindly passerby no doubt bent to mop his brow.
It was all in vain. Only a few minutes after the man first collapsed, he died.

It was a unanimous appointment. The board congratulated the new county physician with firm handshakes and much approving nodding of heads.

Forty-one years old, he had graying brown hair, circular glasses, and wobbly jowls.

The cynical would say, however, that these noble words had absolutely nothing to do with why he took an interest in the radium cases at that moment. The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause.

He died at the age of thirty-six of pernicious anemia after an illness of only a few weeks.

This test wasn’t as easy as simply holding the measuring device over Sarah's prone body.

“[But] this poisoning, if my suspicions are correct, is so insidious, and sometimes takes so long to manifest itself, that I think it possible it has been going on for some time throughout the country without being discovered.”

“[But] this poisoning, if my suspicions are correct, is so insidious, and sometimes takes so long to manifest itself, that I think it possible it has been going on for some time throughout the country without being discovered.”

They reasoned “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.”

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.

Thinking of the fact that, as he later said, “There is nothing known to science that will eliminate, change, or neutralize these [radium] deposits.”