Following the settlement, USRC had immediately launched into damage-limitation mode regarding what it dubbed ‘so-called radium poisoning’; it still denied any hazard existed and seemed confident that the medical board appointed to examine the girls would soon give all five a clean bill of health. The firm wasted no time in appointing two doctors who might well give that clearance: one was James Ewing, the radium-medicine specialist who had already spoken out against Martland – one of Berry’s doctor friends warned, ‘[He] must be watched’ – and the other, mutually agreed appointment was Lloyd Craver. Both were consultants at a hospital ‘closely allied with the use of radium’, but Berry found it ‘impossible’ to keep them out. The girls’ appointed physician would be Edward Krumbhaar. Martland wrote: ‘The damage is done now and Berry must make the best of it.’
In the fall of 1928, the girls were summoned to a New York hospital for the first committee examination. Since two of the physicians denied the existence of radium poisoning, it is to be wondered what they thought of the suffering women who now came before them. Katherine was ‘obviously very lame and bent over’; Grace had ‘distinct limitation of motion in her left elbow’ and what remained of her jawbone was ‘exposed’ in her mouth. Quinta was in plaster casts; Edna’s legs irrevocably crossed. Yet as the women stripped and underwent invasive medical exams, conducted by these doctors who were strangers to them, it was perhaps Albina’s condition that shocked the physicians most. Krumbhaar later said, ‘Mrs Larice had marked limitation of motion of both hip joints, so that it was almost impossible for Dr Craver to make a vaginal examination.’
The doctors conducted a breath test; two of them convinced it would clear the company. Yet the results, as Ewing wrote afterwards, ‘proved positive, rather to our surprise’. Rather than take this as evidence the girls were telling the truth, he continued, ‘The question now arises whether there might be some kind of fraud by the patient . . . To make the tests absolutely trustworthy, we think it will be necessary to carry them out at some hotel where the patients can undress.’ The girls would have to go through it all again.
In November, the five women attended the Hotel Marseilles for further examination. This time, only Craver from the committee was present; but it was not he who was in command. Instead, Dr Schlundt – the ‘intimate friend’ of Vice President Barker who had already declared the women to be non-radioactive in the company’s breath tests in April – took charge. Barker himself was also present and ‘assisted’; there was a further doctor, Dr Failla, in attendance too.
The girls perceived at once that this was not an impartial exam, but what recourse did they have to stop it? It was part of their settlement that they would agree to medical procedures. And so they were forced to strip as directed and went through the tests with the company men watching all they did closely.
The moment they were free from the hotel, however, Grace Fryer telephoned Berry. She was – as in many ways she always had been – the lynchpin of the group, and their leader. Now, she brought their collective protests to Berry.
Their lawyer was outraged. He wrote at once to USRC to say he viewed the hotel setting with ‘great suspicion’ and believed the presence of Barker and Schlundt ‘constitutes a breach of the settlement agreement’, for the committee tests were supposed to be non-partisan. As it turned out, however, Dr Failla declared emphatically: ‘All five patients are radioactive.’
It was a genuine blow to the company, for every day they seemed to receive another lawsuit; they’d wanted to have these famous dial-painters deemed free of radium as a further defence. Berry himself was representing one of the new cases, acting for Mae Cubberley Canfield, the dial-painter who’d instructed Katherine Schaub. Like the others, Mae’s teeth were gone and her gums infected; her jaw also ‘felt funny . . . like a knock in it’ and she was paralysed intermittently on her right side.
Berry won a battle partway through the new war when the judge in Mae’s case ruled that Dr Flinn could not conduct examinations of her for the company; only a physician could do it. It was a small victory, for nothing had come of Berry’s complaints to the authorities about Flinn. The lack of action left him free to publish: Flinn next blamed the girls’ ‘improper diet’ for their ‘tendency to store radium in their bones’.
No one knew what von Sochocky’s diet was, but improper or not, that November he lost his battle against the radium inside him. Martland paid tribute to the doctor: ‘Without his valuable aid and suggestions,’ he said, ‘we would have been greatly handicapped in our investigation.’ That was true, for without von Sochocky’s help with the creation of the tests, radium poisoning might never have been medically proven. Of course, without von Sochocky’s invention of luminous paint in the first place, the girls would have been leading very different lives . . .
For the girls, they could not forget what they saw as the doctor’s betrayal in the courtroom. Perhaps, then, there was a kind of schadenfreude in his demise. One newspaper described radium paint as a ‘veritable Frankenstein in a test tube, which has turned on its creator’; Martland added, ‘He died a horrible death.’
It meant he wasn’t present at the national radium conference, held in December 1928. All the key players were there: Hamilton, Wiley, Martland, Humphries, Roach, Ethelbert Stewart, Flinn, Schlundt and the radium-company executives.
No one invited the dial-painters.
It was a voluntary conference, organised by the trade, in an attempt to claw back some control. The Surgeon General, who was chairing it, acknowledged that ‘anything we draw up here is simply in the form of suggestions, but not any authority in the way of police regulations’. It was, as Wiley’s boss later put it, ‘a whitewash’.
The issues were debated. Stewart made a passionate speech to the radium industry: ‘The luminous watch is purely a fad. Do you want to go ahead with the use of a thing which is so useless; which has, in spite of everything you can do, an element of serious danger in it? I certainly hope that you are going to agree that it is not worth what it costs.’
But the companies did not agree; one firm said 85 per cent of its business came from luminous dials – it was far too lucrative an industry to abandon. The executives argued that only New Jersey cases had come to light so it wasn’t a nationwide problem; with Flinn having silenced the Waterbury girls, Stewart could riposte with only one formally documented case outside USRC, which was evidenced by the Ella Cruse lawsuit in Illinois – yet hers was only a suspected case and not proven. The lack of evidence of an endemic problem meant the girls’ supporters were powerless to push through any proposals, even though Wiley’s boss called it ‘cold-blooded murder in industry’.