Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.
Viedt gave a statement to the press. There was ‘small possibility’, he said, ‘of the existence of a “radium poison” menace’. Speaking of the newly appointed Dr Flinn, the USRC-employed company doctor, he revealed, ‘We have engaged persons of the greatest reliability and reputation to conduct an investigation.’ He told the press that Sarah had been examined by the Life Extension Institute while working for the company and, perpetuating the position taken back in June 1924 when the firm had chosen to ignore the unpublished Drinker report, revealed that ‘nothing was found in our plant not found among average industrial employees’. It was, he said, ‘absurd to think the same condition could have caused the deaths of Dr Leman and Sarah Maillefer. The latter could not have handled in one hundred years of her work half the amount of radium Dr Leman handled in one year. The amounts handled by [Sarah] were so infinitesimal that in the opinion of company officials the work could not be considered as hazardous.’
Yet those infinitesimal amounts still left a trace – something that Martland was discovering. Sarah’s autopsy was conducted nine hours after her death. She was the first-ever dial-painter to be autopsied; the first radium girl to have an expert examine every inch of her body for clues as to what could have caused her mysterious downfall.
The medical detective made notes as he moved down her silent corpse, working from head to toe. He stretched her mouth wide, looked inside. It was ‘filled with old, dark, clotted blood’. He inspected her left leg, the one she’d been limping on for three years; it was, the doctor noted, 4 centimetres shorter than her right.
He weighed and measured her internal organs; stripped out her bones to run his tests. He looked inside those bones, into the bone marrow where the blood-producing centres lay. In a healthy adult, the bone marrow is usually yellow and fatty; Sarah had ‘dark-red marrow throughout [the] entire shaft’.
Martland was a medical man. He had seen for himself the application of radium to treat cancers in hospital, and he knew how that worked. Radium had three types of rays that it constantly emitted: alpha, beta and gamma rays. The alpha ray was a very short ray and could be cut off by a thin layer of paper. A beta ray, which had a little greater penetrating power, could be cut off by a sheet of lead. (Modern science says a sheet of aluminium.) The gamma ray was very penetrating, and it was ‘by its gamma ray’ a radium expert said, ‘you might say it is magic’, for the gamma radiation was what gave radium its medicinal value, being able to travel through the body and be directed at a tumour. It was the gamma and beta rays the lab workers protected themselves against with their lead aprons; they didn’t need to worry about the alpha rays as they could do no harm, being unable to penetrate skin. That was just as well, for alpha rays, which formed 95 per cent of the total rays, were ‘physiologically and biologically intensely more irritating than beta or gamma’ rays. In other words: the worst kind of radiation.
In Sarah Maillefer’s body, Martland now realised, the alpha rays had not been blocked by a thin sheet of paper or by skin – they were not blocked by anything. The radium was in the very heart of her bones, in close proximity to her bone marrow, which was constantly bombarded by rays from the radioactive deposits. ‘The distance,’ Martland later said, ‘is approximately one-hundredth of an inch from the blood-forming centres.’
There was no escaping this most dangerous poison.
Given the extreme power of the alpha rays – those ‘whirling, powerful, invisible forces we do not yet understand’, as von Sochocky had once written – Martland now realised that it didn’t matter that the amount of radium Sarah had worked with was ‘infinitesimal’. From the tests, the doctor estimated that her body contained 180 micrograms of radium; a tiny amount. But it was enough. It was ‘a type of radiation never before known to have occurred in human beings’.
He continued his tests. And now he discovered something that no one had ever appreciated before. For he didn’t just test Sarah’s affected jaw and teeth for radioactivity – the site of all the dial-painters’ necroses – he tested her organs, he tested her bones.
They were all radioactive.
Her spleen was radioactive; her liver; her gammy left leg. He found it all over her, but chiefly in her bones, with her legs and jaw having ‘considerable radioactivity’ – they were the parts most affected, just as her symptoms had shown.
It was an extremely important discovery. Dr Humphries in Orange had never connected the cases he had seen because the women presented different complaints – why would he have thought that Grace Fryer’s aching back might be connected to Jennie Stocker’s peculiar knee or Quinta McDonald’s arthritic hip? But it was the same thing affecting all the girls. It was radium, heading straight for their bones – yet, on its way, seeming to decide, almost on a whim, where to settle in the greatest degree. And so some women felt the pain first in their feet; in others, it was in their jaw; in others still their spine. It had totally foxed their doctors. But it was the same cause in all of them. In all of them, it was the radium.
There was one final test that Martland now conducted. ‘I then took from Mrs Maillefer,’ he remembered, ‘portions of the femur and other bones and placed dental films over them. [I] strapped [the films] all over [her bones] at various places and left them in a dark room in a box.’ When he’d tried this experiment on normal bones, leaving the films in place for three or four months, he had not got the slightest photographic impression.
Within sixty hours, Sarah’s bones caused exposure on the film: white fog-like patches against the ebony black. Just as the girls’ glow had once done, as they walked home through the streets of Orange after work, her bones had made a picture: an eerie, shining light against the dark.
And from that strange white fog Martland now understood another critical concept. Sarah was dead – but her bones seemed very much alive: making impressions on photographic plates; carelessly emitting measurable radioactivity. It was all due, of course, to the radium. Sarah’s own life may have been cut short, but the radium inside her had a half-life of 1,600 years. It would be shooting out its rays from Sarah’s bones for centuries, long after she was gone. Even though it had killed her, it kept on bombarding her body ‘every day, every week, month after month, year after year’.
It is bombarding her body to this day.