The Poisoner's Handbook (32 page)
Gettler and Freireich assembled a research colony of twenty-four animals, half destined to become canine alcoholics. They started by giving those twelve dogs drinks that were 98 percent water and 2 percent ethyl alcohol. Over the next two months the alcohol portion was increased to 30 percent. When Gettler and Freireich were sure that their dogs were habituated to alcohol, they started the actual experiment; it would continue for two years before they were satisfied with the results.
They started simply, comparing the effects of alcohol on a dog accustomed to ethyl alcohol to one that had never touched it before. Both animals were given that 30 percent alcohol solution in increasing amounts. At half a cup, the chronic drinker was unfazed, as “playful as ever.” His companion, though, developed a slightly staggering walk and then sat down and refused to move. When they doubled the amount, even the dog accustomed to alcohol was affected: when set loose in the test chamber, his walk was a little unsteady, and he showed a preference for sitting down—although he would come when called. The other dog wove one precarious line around the room and then passed out, waking up almost twenty-five minutes later.
The two chemists repeated the comparison eleven more times, waiting a month or so between each test. The pattern never altered—ethyl alcohol visibly impaired the first-time drinker but had far less dramatic effect on the chronic imbiber. After each set of observations, the dogs were killed with illuminating gas. Samples of their brains, livers, blood, and spinal fluid were analyzed. Every time, “although the dogs were of the same weight, received the same quantity of alcohol, lived approximately the same length of time after the alcohol administration,” there was less alcohol content in the organs of the habitués than in those of the novice drinkers; on average, the scientists found twice as much alcohol in their novice dogs.
To be sure, the habituated dogs showed signs of intoxication, but they did so more slowly. Once the amount of alcohol in any dog’s brain climbed above 0.25 percent (+++ or more on the human scale), the animal became obviously tipsy, just as people did. This suggested something important to Gettler—that no one developed an actual immunity to the effects of alcohol. “If acquired resistance was the cause of tolerance, then the picture obtained from the analyses should be quite different,” he pointed out.
If their alcohol-experienced dogs had become resistant, they should have stayed perpetually sober. If they were immune to intoxication, then those +++ brain levels should have left them unaffected. But even the most hard-headed dogs reached a point, when enough alcohol had reached their brains, that they also appeared as stumbling
drunks
.
drunks
.
Essentially, the Gettler and Freireich study showed how the body of a habitual drinker adjusted, became more efficient in metabolizing ethyl alcohol. The liver generated more enzymes to break the alcohol down. More liquor was processed out, so less entered the bloodstream. It thus took longer for an intoxicating amount to accumulate and reach the brain. That wasn’t pure good news. Chronic drinkers needed to take in more alcohol, sometimes a lot more, to reach the level in the brain that produced intoxication. They usually responded by drinking more.
That was why experienced drinkers were credited with having such hard heads for liquor—they could drink at the same rate as their friends and be less affected. But it was not some kind of magical immunity that they acquired; rather, it was what Gettler and Freireich called the deceptively healthy, ultimately destructive internal chemistry of “the habitual drunkard.”
ON THE first day of January 1931 the department store heir Lee Adam Gimbel jumped from the sixteenth floor of the Yale Club, having seen his fortune disappear with the economic downturn. In February the once-wealthy owner of a shoe company poisoned himself in a downtown hotel. In March a plumbing supply manager jumped from the ninth floor of the New York Athletic Club. In April the broker-husband of heiress Jessie Woolworth killed himself with mercury bichloride. In May a law firm partner dived out of his third-floor room at the Hotel Commodore, dying of a fractured skull.
The stock market, already hammered in the Black Tuesday crash of 1929, had sputtered erratically before free-falling again, pushed even deeper into trouble by economic collapses in Europe and alarming crop losses across the Great Plains states, as what appeared to be a persistent drought settled into place. During 1930 stock values had fallen a full 40 percent and two thousand banks had failed nationwide. In 1931 those numbers got worse.
In his annual report, issued that spring, Charles Norris announced that New York City had reached a new high in violent deaths the previous year—6,525 across the five boroughs, driven by the leaping suicides that followed the economy’s downward spiral. Self-terminations totaled 1,471, an average of three deaths per day. That meant that nearly one-fourth of the city’s violent deaths could be attributed to despair.
DESPITE THE bleak increase in the medical examiner’s workload, the department’s budget had been slashed in response to the city’s own economic struggles.
“At the present time I am spending nearly $300 a month from my own personal funds for work which in my opinion has absolutely to be done to keep up the work of the office,” Charles Norris wrote to the mayor’s office in early 1932. “This is no pleasure to me in these depressed times, for I suffer from them just as much as anybody else. You can rest assured that I would not give out this amount of money monthly unless I considered it of importance.” His department had always run on a minimal budget. But now it was less than minimal.
Gettler was doing two men’s work on a salary of less than $4,000 a year; the city was refusing to fund the position of assistant chemist due to a budget shortfall, even though the salary was only $100 a month. Norris was paying a young chemist’s half-time salary out of his own pocket, because “he would be down and out without it.”
He was tired enough and angry enough to write a letter to the
New York Times
and complain about the mediocre administrators of a so-called great city and the difficulty of maintaining a world-class medical examiner’s office: “It has been an uphill battle from the start.” Norris wrote more privately to the mayor’s office, announcing that he needed a vacation. He was going to spend his money on something besides subsidizing the city. He and Mrs. Norris were leaving on a steamer trip to the West Indies for a month’s respite.
New York Times
and complain about the mediocre administrators of a so-called great city and the difficulty of maintaining a world-class medical examiner’s office: “It has been an uphill battle from the start.” Norris wrote more privately to the mayor’s office, announcing that he needed a vacation. He was going to spend his money on something besides subsidizing the city. He and Mrs. Norris were leaving on a steamer trip to the West Indies for a month’s respite.
He would be back in late March. But if the New York City administrators hadn’t learned to appreciate good forensic science by that time, he would have to reconsider whether the medical examiner’s job was worth keeping.
“Altogether,” Norris wrote, “the situation is becoming one where I doubt the advisability of remaining in the office permanently.”
IT WASN’T JUST the budget frustrations. Norris had a depressing sense that he and other forensic scientists were trying to teach the rest of the world the same lessons, over and over again, and that the rest of the world was not really paying attention.
Harrison Martland was still trying to impress upon the rest of his profession that radium poisoning posed a public health hazard. The work had proved disheartening. He’d recently been shocked when a leading authority on industrial diseases “told me that this disease is an obscure one about which little is known.
“I cannot agree with this statement,” he wrote stiffly in the introduction to a 1931 paper on the hazards of luminous paint, detailing the work done by himself, by Gettler, by physicians working for the Consumers’ League, by researchers at Harvard and Yale, and by enough scientists that no one should call the problem obscure.
A steady drumbeat of dial painter deaths continued: the previous fall, Martland had logged the fifth death since the legal settlement by the New Jersey plant, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had been bedridden at her sister’s home for months after her hips crumbled. She left behind a husband and a three-year-old daughter. One of the Radium Girls from the lawsuit was also dead; another was in the hospital, her right leg having fractured as she walked across a room.
When New Jersey newspapers discovered that Martland was keeping a list of these deaths, which journalists described as “a kind of doom book,” he was furious. Martland fielded dozens of calls asking whose names were in the book. He blamed the lawyers for informing the press and decided to do no further work for them. He feared that the barrage of publicity was turning the women into freaks.
“I naturally don’t like to talk of it,” Martland snapped to a curious reporter.
The list was intended as a record of the length of time it might take for symptoms to appear. As he’d noted in his recent paper, radium poisoning took two distinct forms. One was acute: these early deaths were characterized by severe aplastic anemia, a rapid disintegration of the bones of the jaw, spreading sores on the lips and tongue, and opportunistic bacterial infections.
The “later group,” as he called it, had probably absorbed less radium at the start. Those workers sickened more slowly, gradually developing “low-grade, crippling lesions in their bones,” which Martland thought were caused by the buildup of radioactive deposits in the bones themselves, followed by collapse within the bone marrow. Neither picture was a happy one. He hated the way reporters kept describing his data as a catalog of the the doomed.
“This list would hardly bring pleasant thoughts to those whose names were on it.”
NORRIS RETURNED from his West Indies cruise, cheered by golden weather and legal rum. On March 31, only a couple of weeks later, another radium death occurred, one that would boost the issue out of its medical backwater.
Here was an “important” radium death, the difference in response lying in the social class of the deceased. This was no Italian-American factory worker from New Jersey but a fifty-two-year-old millionaire, an industrialist, an athlete, and a member of the social elite. Eben M. Byers was chairman of A.M. Byers Iron Factory and a director of the Bank of Pittsburgh and of the Pennsylvania and Lake Erie Dock Company.
Byers had lived a life of privilege, even as the economy foundered. He was in no danger of losing his racing stables in New York, his house in Pittsburgh (where the foundry was located), or his vacation cottages in Rhode Island and South Carolina. He was a graduate of Yale, a national tennis champion, a trap shooter, and a famously fun, elegantly dressed party lover.
Five years earlier, while returning home on a chartered train from the Harvard-Yale game, Byers had stayed up late drinking with friends. Eventually he took a drunken tumble from his sleeping berth and injured his left arm. The injury refused to completely heal. He developed an endless ache in the arm, painful enough to disrupt his sleep. He went to doctor after doctor. At length one Pittsburgh physician recommended Radithor, the radium-based health drink, sold out of Orange, New Jersey.
By the end of 1931, by his own estimate, Byers had swigged more than a thousand bottles of Radithor, never connecting the contents of the health drink with the unfortunate deaths of a few factory girls. But by that time he was also ill: his bones were mysteriously splintering, and his skin was yellowing as his kidneys failed. When he died in March 1932 in Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, he’d shrunk to a weight of ninety-two pounds. He was also exhaling radon gas.
Byers had been so secretive about his illness, so humiliated by the loss of his athletic good looks, that news of his death came as a complete shock to other businessmen. Rumors circulated that he’d lost his money, that the foundry was about to fail, that he’d poisoned himself following financial losses. Partly to stem the panicky speculation, the city ordered an immediate autopsy from the medical examiner’s office.
In fact, Mayor Walker—who was also drinking radium water to relieve his achy joints—asked Charles Norris to do the job himself. Norris sought two assistants in the work: Martland to help with the autopsy itself, and Gettler to analyze the bones.
THEIR REPORT could have been taken directly from the Radium Girl case files: necrosis in both jaws, anemia, brain abscess (in the right cerebral cortex), damaged kidneys, and ravaged bone marrow, “all symptomatic of radium poisoning,” Norris reported to the mayor. Byers’s bones were so radioactive that when Gettler sealed them in black photographer’s paper and film, he could achieve a perfect image of the dead man’s vertebrae, each knobby point outlined in the rapid-fire emission of gamma and beta rays from the bone.
Only days after Norris reported the cause of Byers’s death, the industrialist’s influential friends were calling up their allies in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission promptly announced public hearings into the safety of drugs like Radithor, and the FDA issued a warning regarding their safety. As the
Journal of the American Medical Association
noted: “Many of the radioactive substances sold to the public for the cure of diseases are dangerous to health. Dr. Martland found that if taken as directed the amount of radioactive substance in them would be equal to that taken by dial painters in New Jersey.”
Journal of the American Medical Association
noted: “Many of the radioactive substances sold to the public for the cure of diseases are dangerous to health. Dr. Martland found that if taken as directed the amount of radioactive substance in them would be equal to that taken by dial painters in New Jersey.”
At a quickly called press conference, Gettler put it more simply: “At first you feel fine. It bucks you up. Then we get ready to put parts of you in a frame.” In the fall of 1932 the trade commission issued a cease-and-desist order against Bailey Radium Laboratories, which manufactured Radithor, banning transport of the material. The FDA, which had been given extremely limited authority when created in 1906 (it could do little more than warn consumers), added the Radithor case to its newly vigorous campaign for expanded legal powers. Both the United States and Europe were discussing new rules restricting all uses of radioactive materials.
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