The Victorians were fascinated by the figure of the female poisoner, oozing loveliness and sweetness, offering her husband a second spoonful of sugar for his tea and then making it a lethal one. Readers found a mixture of fascination, fear and excitement in this literally femme fatale image. In fact, more than 90 per cent of convicted spouse murderers in nineteenth-century Britain were men. But men were far more likely to stab or strangle their wives; twice as many wives as husbands stood trial for the more indirect murder method of poisoning.
It wasn’t always a straightforward case. Arsenic abounded in everyday life. Arsenical paint found its way on to children’s toys, nursery book covers, green wallpaper and curtains; cosmeticians incorporated it into beauty products; it was an ingredient in virility pills, pimple creams and cheap beer. As a result, in cases of unexpected death, toxicologists had to be sensitive to the amount of arsenic in a corpse, so as to avoid wrongly charging someone with murder.
Down the years manufacturers have used a variety of other poisonous elements in their products, sometimes in ignorance of their ill effects, sometimes hoping to keep everyone else in ignorance. In the early twentieth century the work of two New York doctors would have lasting implications for negligent corporations as well as for would-be killers.
In 1918 Charles Norris set up the first organised medical examiner system in the world when he became New York City’s first Chief Medical Examiner, responsible for investigating the bodies of people who had died unnaturally or suspiciously. Previously, forensic pathology had been the preserve of ‘elected coroners’, who were generally unqualified barbers or undertakers or worse. Forensic historian Jurgen Thornwald counted ‘eight undertakers, seven professional politicians, six real-estate agents, two barbers, one butcher, one milkman [and] two saloon proprietors’ serving as elected coroners in New York between 1898 and 1915. The system was incompetent and corrupt. But now the Chief Medical Examiner and his staff would have to be doctors of medicine as well as ‘skilled pathologists and microscopists’.
Norris appointed Alexander Gettler as Pathological Chemist, and asked him to set up the first forensic toxicology lab in the US. Gettler set about inventing a host of techniques for uncovering toxins. At a time when poisonings from bootlegged alcohol were reaching epidemic levels, Gettler developed many new ways to identify the active ingredients. Each time he dealt with a case involving an unknown toxin he took a piece of liver from the local butcher’s shop, injected it with the toxin and experimented until he could recover and identify it.
He studied more than 6,000 brains to come up with ‘the first scientific scale of intoxication’. After Gettler, pathologists started testing brain tissue for the presence of alcohol in all violent or unexplained deaths. He also devised tests for chloroform, carbon monoxide, cyanide, blood and semen, among other substances. So when science itself was put in the dock, Norris and Gettler were the obvious experts to put it under scrutiny.
The story begins in Paris in 1898, with Marie Curie’s discovery of a trio of radioactive elements, thorium, polonium and radium, and the subsequent exploitation of their properties. By 1904 doctors had started using radium salts to shrink cancerous tumours, which they called ‘radium therapy’. It was seen as the new miracle substance – radium water, radium soda, radium facial creams, radium face powder, radium soaps were all the rage. Advertising hoardings were full of the glowing element, rejuvenator of body and soul.
Nothing seemed beyond radium’s benevolent rays. The US Radium Corporation even applied radium paint to watch faces to make them emit a pale greenish glow. By the end of the First World War, glow-in-the-dark watches had found their way on to the wrists of fashionistas across the United States, and the Radium Corporation was doing a roaring trade.
The dial painters at the Corporation’s factory in Orange, New Jersey, painted around 250 watch faces a day. Their managers instructed them to be as neat as possible when applying the expensive paint to the watches; they were taught to make the brush tips come to a sharp point with their lips. These were young women, and when they had a break they used to paint their fingernails and streak their hair with the radium paint; one of them even gave herself a spooky smile by covering her teeth.
A contemporary advert for a radium-based facial cream, ‘made to the formula of Dr Alfred Curie’
But by 1924 the Orange dial painters had started to fall ill. Their jawbones were rotting. They lost the ability to walk as their hips dislocated and their ankles cracked. They were constantly tired from low levels of red blood cells. Nine died. Worried about the business repercussions, US Radium hired a group of scientists from Harvard University to investigate. They concluded that the deaths were ‘connected’ to the factory work. The nervous management were so scared about the profit implications that they prevented the report from being published. But another group of scientists also carried out tests on the workers.
Forensic pathologist Harrison Martland read their report and was determined to investigate further. Martland was a passionate campaigner for workplace safety, publishing research demonstrating that nitroglycerine was poisoning workers in explosive factories, and that beryllium, used in the fledgling electronics industry, could cause fatal lung diseases. Regulation on both those chemicals soon followed his work.
Nine of the ‘Radium Girls’, whose jobs painting watch faces with glow-in-the-dark paint gave them fatal radiation poisoning
Martland studied the bodies of living and recently dead Orange workers, and published his findings in 1925. The element radium is structurally related to calcium, he explained. When it is ingested, the body treats it like calcium: some is metabolised, some is transmitted to the nerves and muscles, most is deposited in the bones. But unlike calcium, which strengthens bones, radium bombards them with radiation, destroying the blood-building marrow at their core and creating tiny holes, which get larger with time.
That year a small group of former employees took the brave step of suing US Radium. It took the ‘Radium Girls’ – as the press quickly dubbed them – three years of legal wrangling just to get a trial date.
Meanwhile, Martland had asked Charles Norris at the New York Medical Examiner’s Office to gather evidence for the trial. Together they planned to exhume the body of former dial painter, Amelia Maggia, who had died at the age of twenty-five. In her last year of work she had lost weight and suffered joint pains. The following year her jaw had started splintering, and nearly all of it had had to be removed. She had died in September 1923, of ‘ulcerative stomachitis’, in the words of the coroner.
Norris asked Alexander Gettler to analyse Amelia’s bones, including the skull, feet and right tibia. Gettler’s team boiled them for three hours in a solution of washing soda. Then they sawed the larger ones into two-inch pieces. Gettler brought the bones into a darkroom which contained X-ray films. He sealed the bones tight up next to the X-ray films and did the same for some control bones from another corpse. When Gettler came back to see the results ten days later, the X-ray films around Amelia Maggia’s bones had a dazzle of pale spots on them, and the control films had nothing. He published the results of his experiment.
As the lawsuit dragged on, the condition of the Radium Girls deteriorated. Two of the five girls were Quinta and Albina Maggia, sisters of Amelia. Both of Quinta’s hips had fractured and Albina could not leave her bed; by now, one of her legs was four inches shorter than the other. Another woman, Katherine Schaub, was hoping to use the money to buy roses for her funeral.
The defence lawyers for US Radium tried to stall things further, arguing that the women couldn’t sue because they weren’t working at the factory any more. But the prosecution drew on the research of Martland and Gettler to argue that, while traditional toxins like arsenic and mercury poison you for a period of time, radium stays with you for ever. When the Radium Girls breathed out, all five of them exhaled radon gas.
The courts dismissed US Radium’s motion and insisted the trial go ahead. This prompted them to settle
, giving each of the women $10,000 cash, annual pensions and free health care. It was a cheap settlement; at least two of them were dead within the year.
The sad story of the Radium Girls is told by Deborah Blum in her book The Poisoner’s Handbook (2010). The length of time it took for the employers to be punished and the victims to be given some kind of justice speaks to the modern problem of industrial worker poisonings. James C. Whorton, author of The Arsenic Century (2010), has written: ‘As with arsenical candles and papers and fabrics, items become established in commerce before their dangers are recognized, ensuring that any attempt to curtail their use will be resisted by manufacturers … and fought or ignored by politicians ideologically opposed to government interference …’
Gettler’s forensic toxicology laboratory became a model for others. The combined endeavours of scientists narrowed down the list of untraceable toxins until virtually none remained. But although the use of poison as a murder weapon has tailed off, and working conditions for industrial workers have improved in developed countries, the number