Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Such people get no pass, sincerity notwithstanding. It's incumbent on anyone to look at the evidence. [...]
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Sure, but right up until the end of part one in the book (Aug 1925) the evidence was not necessarily clear. They had hundreds of girls through that factory. It was not until years later that the cases began to show up, and these were initially (relatively) few and with a mix of diagnoses. There was much confusion even amid the doctors involved through the early cases. It would have seemed extraordinary that it could have had anything to do with their work from years earlier - especially considering the reputation that radium had been enjoying. (Just because it was a manufactured reputation doesn't mean that the manufacturers didn't believe it - or come to believe it - themselves.)
And that is what I mean about problems really seeing the full context with the way this book is presented. It's perfectly clear to the reader what is going on, but only because we are presented with a cherry-picked collection of cases and few hints on what is happening on the other side. At the time it would have been so easy to misread the situation, even if the management had been unusually well meaning - which doesn't seem the case - and even if sexual discrimination wasn't a factor - which it clearly was.
The real turning point for the USRC, for me, was ignoring the Drinkers' report (June 1924) - the one that USRC themselves commissioned. For many pages the author let us believe the report itself had been ambiguous, and I'm really not sure why she did that, I'm not used to non-fiction deliberately obscuring the facts like that. That the senior management misrepresents the results of this report is the first clear sign of unambiguously wrong doing (it seemed to me). But it is still a report that lacks the crucial evidence found by Martland a year later, so I can easily envisage that someone with a vested interest would want to argue with it.
I don't find the change of procedures (to try and stop the ingesting) to be convincing evidence of anything more than management's desire to appease their critics. I don't think you can read into that that they really believed it would make any difference - after all, no one at this stage even understood the mechanism by which radium was affecting its victims.
Curiously, it is the reading I've done in the last 6 months or so - in relation to fake news and lack of acceptance of science and so on - that has fed some of my interpretation of this book. On the Scientific American and similar websites have been numerous articles about how to argue with people that don't seem to accept what appears to ourselves to be clear evidence. (eg:
How to talk to a science denier, but there have been many more.) After reading all these it is easy to see how, a century ago (but probably next century too), people get into a position where they feel that cannot do anything except deny the evidence; the consequences of anything else are too confronting to be borne.
Consider what Roeder was facing on June 1924 when that report arrived. What evidence he had up to this time, while obvious in the book, I suspect in real life would have been seen as inconsistent and unconvincing. So I can easily believe that up to this time he sincerely believed there was no serious threat to the girls from the radium. Then this report arrives.
If he believes it, and knowing of the hundreds (thousands?) of girls that had passed through his factory, he will realise that accepting and admitting it will probably spell the downfall of his company. From a selfish perspective this would be quite frightening, and from a selfless perspective there were many that relied on the USRC, and so himself, for their livelihoods. When confronted with this, it is not a big surprise that he might react badly and even irrationally, and having started down that path it becomes even harder to turn around. I'm not saying he was in the right, but I am saying it is fairly predictable behaviour and - as we've already discussed - not something that has changed since then.
I would have liked to know more about Roeder and how he came to act as he did. But unless the next parts say more than I think is likely, I think his reaction will probably remain opaque. Which is a shame, because understanding his situation and his reaction is the way we might manage to avoid these sorts of situations in the future.