On the X-ray, there was a ‘white shadow’, as Humphries called it. It was peculiar, showing ‘a white mottling throughout the bone’. He had never seen anything quite like it. 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 fact, there was one person who had realised exactly what the problem was – one person, that is, beyond the chemist Dr Szamatolski, who had long ago identified that, ‘Such trouble as may have been caused is due to the radium.’ In September 1924, Dr Blum, having now treated Hazel Kuser for eight months, made an address to the American Dental Association about jaw necrosis. He referenced only Hazel’s case, and merely in a brief footnote, but it was he who made the first-ever mention in medical literature of what he now termed ‘radium jaw’. He didn’t believe the company’s protestations of innocence; in fact, fuelled by their cold-hearted response when he had begged them to help his patient, he now promised Hazel ‘all necessary assistance should court action be brought versus the company’.
One might have thought that this new term – radium jaw – and the dentist’s ground-breaking diagnosis would have captured the imagination of the medical community. But in fact it went entirely unnoticed – by other dentists; by the dial-painters, who were not privy to medical publications; and by physicians, like Dr Humphries in Orange.
Standing before Quinta McDonald’s X-ray in that summer of 1924, completely at a loss, Humphries nevertheless had to offer a diagnosis to his patient. Quinta remembered, ‘They told me that I had an arthritic hip.’
Humphries duly strapped her leg for a month but, unlike with Grace Fryer, there was no improvement. And so, that summer, Quinta McDonald was encased in plaster, from her diaphragm down to her knees, to keep her body absolutely still in the hope that it would mend her troubles. ‘I could still hobble around,’ she said, ‘with a cane.’
But hobbling around wasn’t much good for the mother of two young children. It was even harder trying to care for Robert and Helen after that. It is likely that Quinta’s sister Albina – who was still without her own family – helped out; the two sisters now lived some fifteen minutes’ walk away from each other in Orange.
To Quinta’s relief, the dramatic treatment seemed to bear fruit: ‘That cast eased the pain and helped a little,’ she remembered. She tried not to think of what was happening beneath the cast, of what she’d started to suspect, that ‘one leg was beginning to shrivel up and become shorter than the other’. The cast stayed on for nine long months. As summer turned into fall and she felt some improvement she gave thanks that Dr Humphries’s treatment appeared to have helped her.
It was a time for thanks. On Thanksgiving itself, 27 November, Hazel Kuser was finally released from her New York hospital and allowed to return to Newark to be with Theo and her mother Grace. As the family gathered together, they tried to feel the blessing of the fact that at least she was home.
But she wasn’t the same person anymore. She had ‘suffered so frightfully that her mind seemed affected’. Her priest, Karl Quimby, who was attending the family to offer spiritual comfort, said, ‘She suffered excruciating agony.’
It was perhaps, then – when they tried to think of Hazel and put her first – the biggest blessing of all when, on Tuesday 9 December 1924, she finally passed away. She died at 3 a.m., at home, with her husband and mother by her side. She was twenty-five. By the time she died, her body was in such a distressing condition that the family would not allow her friends to see it at the funeral.
It was Theo who notified the authorities of her passing; Theo who organised the embalming of her battered body and her burial, on 11 December, in Rosedale Cemetery. These were the final things he could do for her, for the woman he had loved since he was a boy.
He didn’t want to think about the future; about the fact that the mortgage on their home had been foreclosed; about the fact that his father had impoverished himself in helping him and Hazel with their bills. By the time she died, Theo Snr. had spent all of his life savings. The family’s bills – for hospitals, X-rays, ambulances, physicians, house calls, medicine and transport to New York – ran to almost $9,000 ($125,000). They had ruined themselves, and it was all for nothing.
Katherine Wiley, of the Consumers League, who had stayed in touch with the family as she continued to support the dial-painters’ cause, found the situation unbearable. Frustrated that nothing had been done by the authorities, she now pursued two leads. First she wrote to Dr Alice Hamilton, a brilliant scientist who was considered the founder of industrial toxicology and who always championed the victims of occupational disease; Hamilton was the first-ever female faculty member of Harvard University and her department chair happened to be one Cecil Drinker.
Hamilton knew nothing of Drinker’s report on the Orange plant, for although Roeder was using it to quash the fears of his employees and to justify the company’s refusal to help the afflicted women, Drinker had not yet submitted it for any official publication. Thus, on receipt of Wiley’s letter, not aware of any conflict of interest, Hamilton enthusiastically expressed the desire that the Consumers League should take up the cases ‘vigorously – with whatever cooperation I can give you’. She wrote, ‘From what I can hear of the attitude of the company, it is pretty callous.’ She proposed that perhaps she could undertake her own study as a ‘special investigator’.
Wiley’s second line of attack was to reach out to Dr Frederick Hoffman, a fifty-nine-year-old statistician who specialised in industrial diseases and worked for the Prudential Insurance Company. After reading Wiley’s letter Hoffman began making enquiries; his first port of call, at Wiley’s urging, was to visit Marguerite Carlough.
It was now almost a year since Marguerite had made that fateful Christmas Eve trip to the dentist. By the time Hoffman visited her in December 1924, he found her ‘a lamentable case which is lingering between life and death, with apparently no hopeful outlook for the future’. He couldn’t help but be moved. Before the year was out, Hoffman, a recognised authority on occupational hazards, had sent a strongly worded letter to President Roeder at USRC. ‘If the disease in question were compensable, I seriously doubt if your company would escape liability,’ he wrote pointedly. And he added: ‘That it will be made compensable in [the] course of time if further cases should arise is self-evident.’