The dentists weren’t the only ones whose interaction with the girls had brought them to the point of frustration. Lenore Young, the Orange health officer, having seen the Department of Labor do nothing with her recommendation that the Public Health Service be called in, now discreetly took matters into her own hands. On 4 April 1924, she wrote confidentially to Katherine Wiley, the executive secretary of the Consumers League, a national organisation that fought for better working conditions for women. ‘The authorities are hesitating,’ Young confided in Wiley. ‘[The Consumers League] must keep after them to see that something happens.’
Wiley was a smart and enterprising woman, in charge of the New Jersey branch of the League. A somewhat plain, dark-haired lady in her early thirties, with features too small for her face, she was a tenacious and driven person. When Young asked for her help, Wiley responded immediately. She was assisted by John Roach from the Department of Labor who – unknown to his boss McBride – gave Wiley a list of the women affected, so she could conduct her own investigation.
It came not a moment too soon. For on 15 April 1924, another young woman lost her life. Jennie Stocker – who Dr Humphries had been trying to treat for her peculiar knee condition, without avail – died suddenly after a short illness at the age of twenty.
The day after she died, Roeder kept his appointment with the Drinkers. He showed them around the plant and then they went up to the studio and spoke to several of the women, including Marguerite Carlough. It is surprising that she was in the studio, and not simply because she no longer worked there; since Christmas Eve 1923 she had been confined to her home, except for her visits to Dr Barry. It is possible that the company had asked her to come in specially to meet the Drinkers, being determined to lay to rest the rumours that Marguerite’s work had made her sick.
She was accompanied by her sister Sarah Maillefer, who now walked with a cane. Sarah was still working at the plant as a dial-painter; the Carlough family was poor, and with Marguerite no longer able to work and the medical bills mounting, they needed every penny they could get. Sarah’s trouble, of course, was very different from that of Marguerite. Evidently, her lame leg was not connected to the awful disease that was plaguing Marguerite’s mouth.
Dr Cecil Drinker was a handsome man with abundant fair hair. He introduced himself to Marguerite with immediate concern for her well-being. Her thin face was very pale and she clutched a bandage to her seeping cheek; she complained of ‘pains in the bones of her face’. It was obvious that she was seriously ill.
Katherine Drinker turned to Roeder and told him that the day’s tour could not be considered an adequate survey. It was imperative, she said, that the Drinkers returned to Orange to make a comprehensive study of the plant and its employees. And so, over two days, from 7 to 8 May 1924, the full Drinker study took place. The scientists, now fully read up on all the radium literature, returned to the plant with their colleague Dr Castle and conducted a detailed investigation. Together, the three doctors inspected all the different facets of the operation, accompanied on their tour by Vice President Viedt.
They met the chief chemist, Dr Edwin Leman, and noted that he had ‘serious lesions’ on his hands. Yet, when they mentioned them, he ‘scoffed at the possibility of future damage’. Perhaps he was mindful of his president’s suggestion that an atmosphere of confidence should be promulgated by the plant’s top men.
Such an unconcerned attitude, the Drinkers soon realised, was ‘characteristic of those in authority throughout the plant’. ‘There seemed to be,’ Cecil Drinker later wrote, ‘an utter lack of realisation of the dangers inherent in the material which was being manufactured.’ Roeder even told him that ‘no malignant growths ever developed on the basis of radium lesions; a statement so easy to disprove as to be ridiculous’.
Up in the studio, the doctors carried out thorough medical examinations of the workers. Twenty-five employees were selected as a representative number; one by one, the nominated dial-painters knocked nervously on the door of the restroom, where the women’s tests were held, before being summoned in.
Sarah Maillefer was one of those chosen. As the doctors requested, she opened her mouth wide so they could prod at her teeth; kept still as they probed firmly around her nose and throat; offered the vulnerable inside of her arm so they could take a vial of blood. The exam then transferred to the darkroom; here, Katherine Drinker ‘examined a number of these women, some quite intimately, to determine to what degree they were luminous when sufficiently in the dark’.
Oh, that luminosity. That glow. Katherine Drinker was stunned by it. As the women undressed in the darkroom, she witnessed the dust lingering on their breasts, their undergarments, the inside of their thighs. It scattered everywhere, as intimate as a lover’s kiss, leaving its trace as it wound around the women’s limbs, across their cheeks, down the backs of their necks and around their waists . . . Every inch of them was marked by it, by its feather-light dance that touched their soft and unseen skin. It was spectacular – and tenacious, once it had infiltrated the women’s clothing. The Drinkers noted that it ‘persisted in the skin’ even after vigorous washing.
The Drinkers didn’t limit their study to the plant: they visited Dr Barry and also met some of the dial-painters who were now exhibiting such similar symptoms, including Grace Fryer. Thanks to the attentions of the expert Dr McCaffrey in New York, however, Grace was the exception to the rule; the Drinkers were pleased to note she had ‘recovered satisfactorily’ from her illnesses.
The same could not be said for Marguerite Carlough. Finding no relief with Barry, she had started consulting Dr Knef, who’d treated Mollie Maggia. Marguerite’s appearance – she who had once favoured dramatic feathered hats and glossy fashion – was by now very bad. Yet the worst was not on the outside, despite her deathly pale skin and emaciated body, but on the inside, ‘from the [constant] discharge of foul pus in her mouth’. She was suffering excruciatingly.
Knef attended her as best he could. ‘At least once a day I’d go up there,’ he remembered. It was a fifteen-to twenty-mile drive from his office to the Carlough home on Main Street, Orange, but on occasion he would attend her from two to six times a day. Sometimes, he recalled, ‘I have been with her as high as three days and three nights on a stretch.’ Such close attention was well beyond the budget of the Carloughs, so Knef was essentially working for free. It was good of him, but it didn’t necessarily mean that Marguerite was receiving the best-qualified attention.
Yet Knef knew more than most about the disease, even if he didn’t, at that time, understand the full implications of his growing knowledge.