It was a unanimous appointment. The board congratulated the new county physician with firm handshakes and much approving nodding of heads.
Dr Harrison Martland, please step up.
Martland had already shown an interest in the dial-painters’ cases, having met briefly some of Barry’s patients. Although, not being able to determine the cause of the problem, he had by his own admission ‘lost interest’, the cases had remained on his mind. Reportedly, when Hazel Kuser died, he had endeavoured to arrange an autopsy to determine the cause of death, but Theo had been so attentive in making the final arrangements for his beloved wife that her body had been buried before Martland could contact the proper authorities.
Martland had perhaps also been hampered by territorial politics. Previously he’d had authority to investigate issues in Newark alone; since the plant and many of the victims had been located in Orange, it wasn’t necessarily the done thing for him to examine the matter further. Now, however, with the broader remit given him by his new role, he had the power to get to the bottom of it.
Martland was a man of extraordinary talents, who had studied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York; he ran his own laboratory at the Newark City Hospital where he was chief pathologist. Though he had a wife and two children, he was in many ways married to the job – he made ‘no difference between weekdays and Sundays’ and worked late most nights. He was forty-one years old, a ‘heavy but distinguished-looking’ man with jowls. His hair, which was light brown and greying at the temples, lay flat on his scalp; he wore circular spectacles. He was the kind of man who worked in his shirtsleeves, ‘sans tie’, a colourful personality who drove open-top automobiles and ‘did his exercises to the loud phonograph music of Scots bagpipes’ every morning. Everyone called him Mart or Marty, never Harrison and certainly never Harry. As chance would have it, he was also a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast.
The Case of the Radium Girls was a mystery to challenge even the greatest of medical detectives.
Martland took his new responsibilities seriously. As he himself said, ‘One of the main functions of a medical examiner is to prevent wastage of human life in industry.’ The cynical would say, however, that this proclamation had absolutely nothing to do with why he took an interest in the radium cases at that moment. The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause.
On 7 June 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.
‘The first case that was called to my attention,’ Martland later remarked, ‘was a Dr Leman.’
The chief chemist of USRC, he who had ‘scoffed’ at the Drinkers when they’d expressed concern about the blackened lesions on his hands the year before, was dead. He died aged thirty-six of pernicious anaemia, after an illness of only a few weeks. His death had occurred much too rapidly for a normal case of anaemia so Martland was called in to conduct an autopsy.
He suspected radium poisoning, but the chemical analyses he carried out on Leman’s body failed to show any sign of the element; specialist testing would clearly be required. Martland, as Drs Knef and Hoffman had done a short time before, now turned to Sabin von Sochocky, an authority on radium, for assistance. And he asked someone else for help too. Where could he possibly find the best-qualified radium expert in town? Surely the United States Radium Corporation knew a little bit about it?
Together, Martland, von Sochocky and USRC’s Howard Barker tested Leman’s tissues and bones in the radium-factory laboratory. In exchange for its help, USRC asked Martland to promise that he would keep his conclusions secret.
The tests were a success. The doctors reduced Leman’s bones to ashes, then tested the ash with an instrument called an electrometer. In so doing, they made medical history in measuring radioactivity in a human body for the first time. In so doing, they determined that Leman had died from radium poisoning; his remains were saturated with radioactivity.
As Martland and von Sochocky worked together, von Sochocky asked the medical examiner to help the dial-painters; Knef made a similar appeal. And so, only a day or so after Leman had died, Martland found himself in St Mary’s Hospital, meeting a brave young woman called Marguerite Carlough.
She lay weakly in her hospital bed, her shockingly pale face surrounded by limp dark hair. At this time, ‘her palate had so eroded that it opened into her nasal passages’. Also visiting Marguerite was her sister Sarah Maillefer.
Sarah was no longer quite as matronly in figure as she had once been; she’d been losing weight for the past year or so. It was the worry, she thought. Worry for Marguerite, who was so badly ill; worry for her daughter, who was now fourteen years old. Like most mothers, she rarely worried about herself.
A week ago she’d noticed that she’d started to bruise easily. And it was more than that, if she was honest with herself: large black-and-blue spots had broken out all over her body. She’d come to see Marguerite anyway, not wanting to miss the visit, limping up the stairs with her walking cane, even though she felt very weak. Her teeth were aching, too, but you had to put things into perspective: look at her sister, she was far worse off. Even when her gums started to bleed Sarah thought only of her sister, who was so close to death.
As Martland met the Carlough girls, he observed that although Marguerite was more ill than Sarah, Sarah was also not well. When he asked her, she confessed that the black-and-blue spots were causing her intense pain.
Martland ran tests and found Sarah to be very anaemic. He told her the results; spoke with her about her jaw trouble. And then Sarah, perhaps finally worried over what it might mean, ‘went bad quite rapidly’ and had to be admitted to hospital. But at least she wasn’t alone. She and Marguerite shared a hospital room: two sisters together, facing whatever might lie ahead.
The hospital doctors examined Sarah closely, concerned at her decline. Her face was swollen on the left side, her glands hot and tender. She was running a temperature of 39 degrees – increasing up to 41 degrees in the evenings – and by now had marked lesions in her mouth. She was, it appeared, ‘profoundly toxic’.