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INTRODUCTION
I have a special affinity for a certain kind of book. Because of prior employment-related experiences, I could empathize with some of the characters and despise some of the others. I had witnessed pain and knew the tactics and motivations of the cruel players in these dramas.
Let me tell you about that.
Driving down a very long dirt road, I came to my turn, a smaller dirt driveway that was even more overgrown with grass. It eventually led to a sad little trailer around which dozens of fancy cars were parked.
Inside, I struggled to find a spot among all of the lawyers five-deep in the living room surrounding the hospital bed on which a man lay gulping oxygen from a cannister.
When it came my turn to interrogate the old, dying man, I could not. After taking the depositions of thousands of men injured or dying from Asbestos exposure, I was suffocating.
“It is my pleasure to meet you, Mr. Johnston. I am humbled by your story. I pass the witness.”
That day, I failed as an attorney. My client, W.R. Grace, miner and manufacturer of Asbestos and Asbestos-infused products, deserved zealous representation—I truly believe that—but it would never again get that from me.
THE MEDICAL-LEGAL MASS TORT BOOK
I became a fan of a particular genre of literature: The nonfiction Medical-Legal Mass Tort Book. From breast implants to tobacco, asbestos to groundwater contamination to radiation poisoning, and on to lead paint, there’s always a company ready to fuck over a large group of people for a little bit of money.
My all-time favorite book in the genre is A Civil Action. The movie starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall is pretty good, but the book is full of insane and ridiculous and wonderful and sad and infuriating details. The movie couldn’t include all of them.
The book is a must-read.
What makes books like A Civil Action so good is that they are real. That shit happened. Somehow. There are real-life heroes and real-life, actual villains. The obstacles seem insurmountable.
And sometimes they really are insurmountable, especially if radiation is involved.
THE RADIUM GIRLS
On Saturday, my Sister handed me a thick book entitled The Radium Girls. She had heaped it with praise. Moreover, the story held a bit of personal history for her, as her Mother-in-law’s mother was a “radium girl” from a small town in Central Illinois.
She died of cancer at a young age.
The story goes like this: Near the beginning of the 20th century, Radium was the new miracle material discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. It wasn’t well understood. It was more radioactive than Uranium. And while scientists were still studying it, hucksters became involved.
Hucksters sold products infused with Radium as beauty aids.
And as medical tonics and cures.
I have included a few of the advertisements that I found in the Library of Congress database because these ads—and others like them—were unsung villains in The Radium Girls.
How else do you get young women, some as young as eleven-years old, to put Radium in their mouths?
Here’s how that happened [spoilers]:
During World War One, a company in New Jersey realized that it could sell watches with luminous dials to soldiers in the trenches. In fact, the government was willing to pay for them.
A workshop was set up, and women were hired to paint the numbers and hands with luminous paint created from water and a powdery mixture that contained Radium.
This was fine work. The brushes only had about thirty camel hairs on them. To keep their dials from being rejected as too sloppy, the women would need to constantly form a point on their brushes.
They were told to do this by sticking the brushes into their mouths.
From there, the minute traces of Radium would gravitate to the dial-painter’s bones, most frequently the jaw, but also the spine, knees, legs and arm bones.
The resulting radiation sickness took diabolically different paths, and it took some years to manifest. However, most of the women suffered severe loss of teeth and many had their jaws crumble in their mouths.
Sarcomas the size of watermelons occurred in others.
Other young ladies couldn’t walk. And all the while, the company denied that Radium was harmful to their workers. In part because of that, other companies opened up shops in Connecticut and Central Illinois.
Their workforce suffered the same health problems.
When it became evident that Radium was causing the health issues, after the deaths of so many young women, it was fascinating to read how the companies would negotiate a price for the life of a young woman because fuck you corporations!
NEW WORKER’S COMP AND TORT LAWS
Because these brave women would tell their stories in courtrooms—a case from Illinois made it to the United States Supreme Court—many laws were added or amended. New Jersey had just enacted its worker’s compensation statutes, and those had to be amended to include industrial poisoning.
Additionally, statutes of limitations had to be reworked. It made sense to have a relatively short statute of limitations for most workplace injuries. An employee knew pretty much right away when his hand was torn off by a factory machine or a fall from the iron skeleton of a skyscraper had killed him.
Because of Radium, a “discovery rule” had to be implemented.
That is, the statute of limitations wouldn’t start to run until the claimant or plaintiff had discovered the injury, until the injury manifested itself. This would come in handy years later when people were figuring out decades after first exposure to tobacco or Asbestos that that exposure was a death sentence. So, my friends, this is what I’m reading.
What are you reading?
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