Martland wanted to test the two women to see if radium was the cause of their illnesses – but the only tests he knew, those he had conducted with von Sochocky and Barker, required burning bone to ash. You couldn’t very well do that with living patients.
It was von Sochocky who came up with the answer. If the women were radioactive, all they had to do was devise some tests to prove it. These tests, which would be honed and largely invented by Drs Martland and von Sochocky, were created specifically to test the dial-painters’ bodies. No physician had ever attempted to test living patients in this way before. Later, Martland would discover that a specialist had done something similar before him, but in June 1925, with the clock running down on Marguerite Carlough, he innovated the tests knowing nothing of the other scientist’s work. He was, indeed, a man of extraordinary talents.
The pair devised two methods: the gamma-ray test, which involved sitting the patient before an electroscope to read the gamma radiation coming from the skeleton, and the expired-air method, whereby the patient blew through a series of bottles into an electroscope so that the amount of radon could be measured. This latter was born from the idea that, as radium decayed into the gas radon, if radium was present in the girls’ jawbones, the toxic gas might be exhaled as they breathed out.
The doctors took their equipment to the hospital to try on Marguerite. But, when they got there, it was Sarah Maillefer they decided to test first.
Being in hospital had not helped her. Despite being given a blood transfusion on 14 June, Sarah had become so ill she’d had to be removed from the room she shared with her sister. When Marguerite asked where she was, the nurses told her Sarah had been ‘removed to receive special treatments’.
That was true, in a way. The tests Sarah was about to have were special, for she was the first dial-painter ever to be tested for the presence of radium. The first who would prove whether or not all that conjecture was correct.
This was the moment of truth.
In a hospital room in St Mary’s, Martland and von Sochocky set up the equipment. They first tested Sarah’s body. As she lay weakly on the bed, Martland held the electrometer eighteen inches above her chest, to test her bones. A ‘normal leak’ would be 10 subdivisions in 60 minutes: Sarah’s body was leaking 14 subdivisions in the same time. Radium.
Next, they tested her breath; the normal result they were looking for was 5 subdivisions in 30 minutes. This test wasn’t as easy as simply holding the measuring device over Sarah’s prone body, though. This test, she had to help with.
It was very hard for her to do, because she was so poorly. ‘The patient was in a dying, almost moribund condition,’ remembered Martland. Sarah found it difficult to breathe properly. ‘She couldn’t for five minutes’ time.’
Sarah was a fighter. It’s not clear if she knew what the tests were for; whether she had the capacity at that stage even to know what was going on around her. But when Martland asked her to breathe into his machine, she tried so very, very hard for him. In . . . out . . . In . . . out. She kept it going, even as her pulse raced and her gums bled and her gammy leg ached and ached. In . . . out . . . In . . . out. Sarah Maillefer breathed. She lay back on the pillows, exhausted, spent, and the doctors checked the results.
The subdivisions were 15.4. With every breath she gave, the radium was there, carried on the very air, slipping out through her painful mouth, passing by her aching teeth, moving like a whisper across her tongue. Radium.
Sarah Maillefer was a fighter. But there are some fights that you cannot win. The doctors left her in the hospital that day, on 16 June 1925. They didn’t see as her septic condition increased; as new bruises bloomed on her body, blood vessels bursting under her skin. Her mouth would not stop bleeding; pus oozed from her gums. Her bad leg was a constant source of pain. Everything was a constant source of pain. She couldn’t take it anymore; she became ‘delirious’ and lost her mind.
But it didn’t take too long, not after that. In the early hours of 18 June, only a week after she’d been admitted to hospital, Sarah Maillefer died.
The same day, Martland conducted an autopsy; the results would take some weeks to come back. He was bound by no promises of secrecy this time. He spoke to the media on the day Sarah died as they gathered to hear of this latest death. ‘I have nothing more than my suspicions now,’ he told them. ‘We are going to take the bones and some of the organs of Mrs Maillefer’s body, reduce them to ashes and make extensive laboratory tests with the most delicate instruments available for radioactive substances.’ And then he continued, probably striking fear into the hearts of Sarah’s former employers: ‘This poisoning, if my suspicions are correct, is so insidious, and sometimes takes so long to manifest itself, that I think it possible it has been going on for some time throughout the country without being discovered.’ That time was now at an end, although Martland wasn’t rushing into anything: ‘We have nothing more definite than a theory at present,’ he said. ‘I will not make the statement that commercial “radium poisoning” exists until we can prove it.’ But, the implication was, once he could . . .
The press were all over it; Sarah’s death even made the front page of the New York Times. Yet while the whole world knew of her passing, there was someone who didn’t.
Her little sister, Marguerite. She hadn’t seen Sarah since 15 June, the night she’d been taken from their shared room. She’d enquired several times as to how her sister was. Even though Marguerite had seen Sarah decline, she must have had hope. Sarah had always been the strong one once Marguerite had sickened, and she had only been seriously ill for a few days.
The nurses put her off when she asked after her big sister. But on 18 June, when the papers were filled with the news of Sarah’s death, Marguerite had innocently asked to see a newspaper.
‘No,’ the nurses said, wanting to spare her.
‘Why?’ asked Marguerite. Of course Marguerite Carlough would ask why.
And so the nurses told her of her sister’s death. ‘She is said to have borne the news bravely – and expressed regret that she could not be present at the funeral.’ She was far too ill to go.
It was Sarah’s father, Stephen, who told the authorities of his daughter’s death; who arranged her funeral; who looked after her teenage daughter, Marguerite. It was he who watched her coffin being lowered into the ground at Laurel Grove Cemetery, shortly after 2 p.m. on Saturday 20 June.
Sarah may have been thirty-five, but it was his little girl who’d gone.
19