The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

by Kate Moore

Dr. Flinn had been examining the girls: taking blood, reading their x-rays. He had been arranging medical treatment and writing to the women on the letter-headed paper of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. “[I] understood,” said Grace’s physician Dr. McCaffrey, who’d arranged her examination with Flinn, “that Dr. Flinn was an MD.”20 But now, when Berry asked the authorities to look into exactly who Flinn was, he received the following letter from the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners: “Our records do not show the issuance of a license to practice medicine and surgery or any branch of medicine and surgery to Frederick B. Flinn.”21 Flinn was not a medical doctor. His degree was in philosophy. He was, as the Consumers League put it, “a fraud of frauds.”