Martland paused in his work, thinking hard. Thinking not just of Sarah, but of her sister Marguerite, and of all the other girls he had seen in Barry’s office. Thinking of the fact that, as he later said, ‘There is nothing known to science that will eliminate, change or neutralise these [radium] deposits.’
‘Radium is indestructible,’ Dr Knef concurred. ‘You can subject it to fire for days, weeks or months without it being affected in the least.’ He went on to make the damning connection. ‘If this is the case . . . how can we expect to get it out of the human body?’
For years the girls had been searching for a diagnosis, for someone to tell them what was wrong. Once they had that, they believed faithfully, then the doctors would be able to cure them.
But radium poisoning, Martland now knew, was utterly incurable.
Following the results of his tests, Martland shared the proven cause of Sarah’s death. ‘There is not the slightest doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that she died of an acute anaemia, following the ingestion of luminous paint.’
As hers was the first properly tested case, it became of considerable interest to medical men. Dr Flinn, the company doctor, immediately wrote to Martland: ‘Would it be possible for me to get a section of [Mrs Maillefer’s] tissues, so I can compare them with those of my [laboratory] animals which I am expecting to kill some time in the next few weeks?’ Dr Drinker, too, followed the progress of the case with great interest. He had not finished his fight with USRC – because Arthur Roeder had not kept his word.
It was the company lawyer, Josiah Stryker, who had handled the delicate matter of the Drinker report and the Department of Labor. He had taken the report to Roach – but refused to let him retain a copy. ‘It will be available to [you],’ he said airily to Roach, ‘at any time [in my office].’ Stryker had left with the report in hand. He added as he went, ‘If the Department insist on having a copy in their own file, [I will] provide one.’
Well, the department had insisted; but the company sent it to McBride, Roach’s boss – the man who had been ‘furious’ when tenacious Katherine Wiley had intervened in the dial-painters’ cases and rebuked Roach as a result – and not to Roach himself.
When Drinker found out, he was furious. On the day Sarah Maillefer died, he wrote to Roeder: ‘I am arranging for the immediate publication of [my] report.’ He was, as the saying goes, planning to publish and be damned. But Stryker was quick with his response: publish and be sued.
Yet if Roeder and Stryker thought they had Drinker pegged, they had thought wrong. One of Drinker’s brothers happened to be a good corporation lawyer. The doctor asked him what he thought of the firm’s threat, and the brother said to ‘tell ’em to sue and be damned!’ So Drinker called their bluff.
The Drinker report – first filed on 3 June 1924 – would finally be published in August 1925, with a press date of 25 May, five days before Hoffman had first read his study, in order to give Drinker precedence on the discovery of the link between the girls’ illnesses and the radioactive paint. Whatever date they put on it, it was published well over a year after being submitted to USRC. Commentators on the case later said, ‘This report by the Harvard investigators was a scientific document of the greatest importance, not only to remedy conditions in this plant, but to acquaint other manufacturers, using the same radium formula, with its toxicity and potentially lethal effects. Science and humanity alike demanded immediate publication of this report . . . but [it] was resolutely suppressed.’
The company had tried to keep everyone in the dark – the Department of Labor, the medical community, the women they had doomed to die. But the light, finally, was flooding in now. The momentum was building for the women’s cause, even as radium’s supporters tried to throw it off-track – and Martland, the girls’ illustrious medical champion, was first in the firing line as pro-radiumites sought to undermine his credibility. William Bailey, the man behind the Radithor tonic, remarked cuttingly, ‘Doctors, who have never had the slightest experience with radium and know no more about it than a schoolboy, have been trying to garner some publicity by claiming harmful effects. Their statements are perfectly ridiculous!’ Bailey added that he would happily ‘take in one dose all the radium used in the factory in one month’.
USRC, too, was quick to step in, with a spokesman saying dismissively, ‘Radium, because of the mystery which surrounds much of its activities, is a topic which stimulates the imagination and it is probably this rather than actual fact that has caused the outcry.’ Roeder weighed in to the debate, claiming publicly that many of the women were ‘unfit’ when they started dial-painting and as an excuse had unfairly impugned the firm. It wasn’t even the female victims alone that USRC attacked. A spokesman said that Leman, the chief chemist who had died, ‘was not in robust health when he began with radium work’.
Yet the momentum that had begun and was now building – first with Hoffman’s report, then Sarah’s sacrifice, and now the Drinker report too – was unstoppable. Even Andrew McBride, who had previously seemed reluctant to intervene, now beat the drum of change. He made a personal visit to the Orange studio and asked why the Drinkers’ safety recommendations had not been put into effect; he was informed that the firm ‘did not agree with them all, many of them had already been followed and some were impractical’.
McBride wasn’t swayed. Now he said that he believed that ‘human life is far too important to be neglected or wasted if it is possible to conserve it’. Consequently, he declared that if the firm did not carry out the Drinkers’ suggestions, ‘I would issue orders to close their factory . . . I would compel them to comply or close, no matter at what cost.’
For those who had long supported the girls, it was a complete turnaround. Karl Quimby, the priest who had offered spiritual comfort to Hazel Kuser, was relieved to observe that, at last, someone in authority was finally taking note. Seeing Dr Martland’s findings reported widely in the eastern press, he felt moved to write to him: ‘I can scarcely express to you how gratified I am that you are doing this splendid thing. [I am] wishing you every success and assuring you of the appreciation of a goodly number of people.’