But, by this time, their former dial-painters disagreed. On 19 January, there was a meeting held in Dr Barry’s office with at least Katherine Schaub, the Smith sisters and Marguerite Carlough present. The girls talked over their identical conditions with their increasingly concerned dentist. ‘We discussed employment at the radium plant,’ Katherine remembered. ‘There [was] some talk of industrial disease.’ The girls agreed ‘there was something going on about this thing’.
Yet . . . what could they do about it? Katherine had already complained to the authorities and nothing had come of it. Even though the evidence pointed to some problem at the plant, no one really knew what the cause was. And much more pressing for the women than the cause, anyway, was searching for a cure – or at least some relief. Their health was their primary concern. Hazel Kuser was by now almost constantly on palliative drugs because her pain was agonising. Marguerite Carlough had come to Barry hoping for treatment of her jaw – but she was to be disappointed. ‘I refused to operate [on] the girl,’ Barry later said, ‘for the reason that previous experience [with Irene Rudolph and Katherine Schaub] taught me that the moment there was any operative procedure attempted, the case would flare up and would be much worse than it was at the time I saw her.’ And so, although the girls were wracked by pain from their teeth, he refused to remove them. All he could offer the panicked women was to keep them under observation.
He couldn’t see what else he could do. He did ask others for help, consulting a highly skilled Newark physician, Dr Harrison Martland. But when Martland examined the girls, he too was puzzled. ‘After seeing several girls in the dental office,’ Martland later wrote, ‘I lost interest in the matter.’
The girls were on their own.
Just down the road at the Orange Orthopaedic Hospital, Grace Fryer wasn’t having much more luck. Just as she’d promised her parents, she had kept her appointment with Dr Robert Humphries to have her painful back and foot examined. Humphries was the head doctor at the hospital, an ‘exceedingly high-grade man’. A Canadian in his forties, Humphries listened carefully to Grace’s complaints and then diagnosed muscle-bound feet and chronic arthritis. He strapped her up for several weeks but noted with concern that there was very little improvement.
Humphries was treating another young woman that spring by the name of Jennie Stocker. He didn’t connect her with Grace Fryer, who worked in a bank, but Jennie had been a dial-painter until 1922 and she and Grace had worked together during the war. She had ‘a very peculiar condition of the knee’ that had been mystifying Humphries ever since he had taken her case.
So many doctors across New Jersey were confused that first month of 1924 – but they didn’t share notes and so each case was viewed in isolation. As January drew to a close, Theo and Hazel Kuser decided that they would look elsewhere for treatment. New Jersey was just a short distance from New York City, where some of the best doctors and dentists in the world had their practices. On 25 January, Hazel, bravely swallowing down her pain, made the journey into the Big Apple for treatment at the office of Dr Theodore Blum.
Blum was one of America’s first oral surgeons, a prestigious specialist who had pioneered the use of X-rays for dental diagnosis. His fees were extortionate, but Theo insisted that they visit him anyway. He could borrow money on their furniture to pay the bills, he reasoned. If it eased Hazel’s pain, if Dr Blum could stop this endless decay in her mouth, then it would all be worth it.
As a mechanic, Theo Kuser was not wealthy, and nor was his family; his father, also called Theo, was a postman. Theo Snr. had saved up money to buy a house for his old age, but he now offered some of his savings to his son for Hazel’s treatment. He took it gratefully and the appointment was duly attended.
Blum was a balding man with a neatly trimmed moustache, spectacles and a high forehead. As he introduced himself to Hazel and began his examination, he quickly realised that he had never seen a condition like hers before. Her face was swollen with ‘pus bags’, but it was the condition of her jawbone that was most perplexing: it seemed almost ‘moth-eaten’. It literally had holes in it.
But what, Dr Blum now pondered, could have caused it?
Blum was worth his money. Later, he would try to find out the exact chemicals in the luminous paint, although to no avail. For now, he took a medical and employment history from Hazel and made a provisional diagnosis: she was suffering from ‘poisoning by a radioactive substance’. He admitted her to the Flower Hospital in New York to operate on her jaw. It would be the first, but not the last, of such procedures Hazel had to endure.
Yet although Blum had offered a diagnosis, and swift and specialist treatment, he didn’t offer the one thing that Theo had been yearning for: hope. That was all he really wanted, to know that there was light at the end of the tunnel; that they could get through this and come out the other side into a shining day, and another one, and another day after that.
Instead, Blum told him ‘there is little chance of recovery’.
All the money in the world couldn’t save his wife now.
The radium girls’ agony hadn’t gone unnoticed in the community. That same month, a civic-minded resident wrote to the Department of Labor to raise concerns about the Orange plant. This time, it was John Roach’s boss, Commissioner Andrew McBride, who stepped in, grilling health officer Lenore Young on what she’d found out the previous summer. She apologised for seeming ‘negligent’, interviewed the affected girls and then recommended that the Public Health Service be called in.
Yet McBride felt there was not sufficient evidence to warrant doing so. His reasoning may have been political, for the Department of Labor was pro-business. Under state law, it had no authority to stop an industrial process even if it was harmful. As a result of these factors, the department now gave the plant a clean bill of health – and completely stopped looking into the dial-painters’ illnesses. They took this decision even though more and more women were suffering the same symptoms.
It was a stalemate. No diagnosis. No clue as to the cause. No one lifting a finger to find out what was really going on in that radium studio in Orange.
But then the stalemate was ended by an unexpected source: the United States Radium Corporation itself.