Her family could not afford the care Hazel urgently needed, so Blum appealed directly to the company. He made sure to say that he wasn’t trying to lay the blame at the firm’s door – even though, by this time, Blum was willing to state that the disease was undoubtedly caused by the material used in dial-painting. ‘It is not a question of whether or not your firm is responsible,’ he wrote carefully, ‘but I feel that if you have the money to spare you should let them have it in some way.’ He wasn’t interested in culpability: this was a matter of life and death.
The response from USRC was swift. Full of the confidence given them by the Drinkers’ report, the company refused to help in any way whatsoever; to do so would establish ‘a precedent which we do not consider wise’. Five years before, the firm had been stung when they’d offered $5 compensation for some ruined laundry; they were not going to make the same mistake again. Instead, they gloried in the conclusions of the recent study: ‘The results of the very thorough investigation which we [made] upon this condition which you claimed was caused by her employment in our plant have shown that there was nothing in our work which might be considered the cause.’ The letter concluded, somewhat insincerely, ‘We are sorry that we cannot help you in this way.’
Blum was stunned. ‘I was only appealing to the humane sense of the officers of your corporation to find out what you would do to help this poor creature,’ he wrote back. ‘I must admit that I am surprised that you failed to see the humane side of the question.’
But the corporation cared not a jot for his jibes. They were guiltless – and they had a report that proved it.
14
Katherine Schaub couldn’t wait for her summer holiday. It had been a horrible twelve months: her cousin Irene dying last July, almost a year ago now, and then Katherine’s own trouble with her teeth starting in November. She knew she was now called a ‘nervous case’ by her doctors, but as much as she tried not to think about her situation, it was very hard not to. She had recently taken work in an office with the idea that it would help take her mind off things.
As it turned out, Katherine had become a bit of a flibbertigibbet in her career, flipping from one company to the next, leaving due to ill health, or her nerves, or because she was looking for the next much-needed distraction. She would move from the roller-bearing company to an insurance company to a motorcar firm and back again, never staying in one place especially long, always having to leave for one reason or another. Anyway, wherever it was she was working, most of her earnings had to go on medical treatment.
Her state of mind worried her father, William, she knew. He was so good to her, always trying to lift her spirits or paying one of her doctor’s bills from his own wages. He didn’t earn much – he was a janitor in a factory, and the family lived in a dingy third-floor flat – but he was happy to give all he could to his daughter if it would make her well.
This summer, Katherine planned to take a much-needed rest. She was only twenty-two – an age Irene had never seen, she realised sadly – and she needed to remember what it was to feel young. All this worry was dragging her down.
Yet when July 1924 arrived, Katherine noted: ‘I could not go away. The condition in my jaw was causing me considerable anxiety and I decided to consult a skilled dental surgeon in New York City; I had to use my vacation money for a new set of X-rays.’
By chance – although perhaps not, given his standing in his field – she chose to consult Dr Blum, who was also treating Hazel Kuser. Back in May, Katherine had had another tooth pulled by a different dentist; as was now becoming the distressing norm, the socket had not healed. The infection was agonising: ‘The pain [I have] suffered,’ she said, ‘could only be compared with the pain caused by a dentist drilling on a live nerve hour after hour, day after day, month after month.’ When Blum examined her in July 1924, he ‘advised work to be done when she is in a physical condition to have it done’; until then, Katherine had to return home unaided.
It was the not knowing what was wrong that was the worst thing, she thought. ‘I had stopped at nothing in an effort to regain my lost health,’ she mused dejectedly, ‘but so far I had failed. No one was able to help me.’
She was at Blum’s office again and again over the summer; not quite the vacation she had planned. Once, she was compelled to obtain an emergency appointment after suffering agonies in the entire right side of her head. She pulled her blonde hair back from her thin face in his office, trying to demonstrate to Blum where the pain was, all down the right side of her skull.
Blum gently probed at her swollen jaw. And, upon pressure, pus discharged from the tooth socket. Katherine felt it burst into her mouth, and felt sick. ‘Why should I be so afflicted?’ she would later ask. ‘I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?’
On one of her visits to Blum, she ran into Hazel, who was there for treatment too. She was unrecognisable; this mysterious new condition, in some patients, led to grotesque facial swellings, literal footballs of fluid sprouting from their jaws, and it seems Hazel may have been afflicted in this way. Accompanied by her mother, she was in no condition to talk. It was Grace Vincent, having to be her daughter’s voice, who told Katherine that Hazel had been seeing Blum for the past six months.
It could not have been a good advertisement for the dentist’s skills. Before the summer was out, Hazel would be rushed to hospital in New York, where she would stay for three months, far from her family and Theo in Newark. To pay for her hospital treatment, her husband mortgaged their home to the hilt.
And Hazel and Katherine weren’t the only ones seeing doctors. Back in Orange, Quinta McDonald was finding it harder and harder to look after her little ones. Her daughter Helen was now four years old; baby Robert had just turned one. It was the pain in her hip that was the problem, shooting all down her right leg. She was hobbling about now with more than just a noticeable limp – it was more like a lurch as she stumbled from one foot to the next. It was the strangest thing, but, she said, ‘It seemed to me that one leg was shorter than the other.’
She must be imagining it. All the twenty-four years of her life her limbs had measured up straight; why would that suddenly change now?
Nevertheless, it was debilitating, especially with Robert crawling about the house at 100 mph and her increasingly unable to keep up with him. She made an appointment with Dr Humphries at the Orange Orthopaedic Hospital, perhaps recommended to her by Grace Fryer. In August 1924, Humphries took an X-ray and perused it for analysis. He’d noted in his physical examination of Quinta that she ‘could not move her hip to complete function’, so he was looking especially for a problem around her hip joint.
Ah. There it was. But what was it?