Medicine: Radium Women

Five young New Jersey women who were poisoned while painting luminous watch dials for U. S. Radium Corp., two years ago heard doctors pronounce their doom: one year to live (TIME, June 4, 1928). The company met their lawsuits by giving each $10,000 cash and $600 a year “for life.”

Only one of the five women has yet died. She was Mrs. Quinta MacDonald, 34, mother of two; died six months ago. Three of the others have led carefully restricted existences, staving off death.*

The other survivor, Katherine Schaub of Newark, reacted to her death sentence as did the men of Jerusalem who, when their city was in danger about 712 B. C., made merry, slew oxen, killed sheep, ate flesh, drank wine, shouted: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die!” (Isaiah 22: 10-13.) Miss Schaub took her $10,000 cash and bought two motor cars. She amused herself at mountain resorts and hotels. She wrote a book, Gambling With Radium, and when her publishers advised her to improve its literary style, she enrolled as a correspondence pupil at Columbia University.

Death did not come to Katherine Schaub at the fatal year’s end, but her money was gone. She took her $600 annuity and retreated to the Sacred Heart Villa at Caldwell, N. J. Last week there, walking through a doorway, she stumbled. A leg, necrosed by the radium, broke. She was taken to the Orthopedic Hospital at Orange, N. J. There doctors thought they could avoid amputation. She lies with the broken leg in a heavy plaster cast.

Said she: “I realize I will be confined here the rest of my life. But I want to finish my book. I got a high grade in my English course.”

*About the time the women’s cases reached public attention, Dr. Sabin A. von Sochocky, Austrian inventor of radium paint, died in New Jersey, his teeth and fingers all gone (TIME, Nov. 26, 1928).