Barry told his patient it was his opinion she was suffering from ‘some occupational trouble’. But as Katherine Schaub later noted, ‘The word radium was never brought into it.’ 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 hospital. She was shockingly pale and found to be anaemic. And it was while in 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 gossip-mongers were saying syphilis had killed her, but the girls who knew her found that hard to believe. And so, while in 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 anaemia. 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 anaemia and pyorrhea; her doctor, too, suspected phossy jaw from the black discharge with its ‘garlic odour’ exuding from her nose and mouth. 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 26 December 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’.
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 sick’, 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’.
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’. Consequently, an additional inspection took place in the next few weeks, with the inspector, Lillian Erskine, delivering her findings to Roach on 25 January.
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.’
Roach arranged for the paint to be tested by Dr 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 30 January 1923: ‘It is my belief that the serious condition of the jaw has been caused by the influence of radium.’
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 conceded in an internal memo that there were a ‘considerable’ 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’ that radium poisoning was the cause.