He was a young man then and it was long, long ago. Yet when he thinks about that day in 1962 it’s as if fifty years have vanished and he’s back at the Box Hill Hospital on a late-summer morning. ‘I’d just delivered a baby when the senior midwife came over and asked me if I could step in and help out with another delivery. The woman’s doctor couldn’t be found.’
Ron Dickinson pauses; he has not told this story often. It’s April 2011 and he’s now eighty-five and living a happy retirement, with a satisfying medical career well behind him. Home is a big house perched high on a bluff with commanding views of Australia’s wild southern ocean. Today he’s seated with his companions in the courtyard of a pretty winery near his home. The doctor’s visitor has asked for his memories of that single traumatic day, decades earlier. Dickinson, who has barely touched his lunch, now pushes it aside.
‘Well naturally I agreed to deliver the baby,’ Dickinson says. The missing doctor was a partner in his busy medical practice, so he felt a sense of obligation. ‘And the woman about to give birth was Wendy Rowe. I knew Wendy and her family, liked them. I was happy to help out.’
A thoughtful man with a gentle manner, Dickinson becomes halting when describing what followed. ‘It was an incredibly distressing event and still crystal clear in my memory. At first the delivery proceeded normally. In those days there was no way of telling in advance that anything was wrong, and there was no reason for any suspicion,’ Dickinson says. ‘Ultrasounds weren’t yet available and I knew Wendy had two healthy girls already. So there was absolutely no indication that anything was wrong, or was likely to go wrong.’
But then, quickly, everything changed.
‘The baby started to come out. Head first, everything OK. But then I saw that there were no arms. And then no legs. The little girl had only a torso and a head. It was a terrible shock. Shocking and disorienting. I hadn’t seen anything like that before.’ Dickinson pauses as he dwells on the moment. ‘I was utterly devastated, both for the poor little girl but also for Wendy and Ian. They were fine people and I really felt for them.’
Dickinson checked the baby. Surprisingly, she seemed perfectly healthy. But his mind was already on the conversation he knew he had to have with Wendy Rowe. Nothing in his training, or his ten years as a doctor, had prepared him for that moment. Heavens, how on earth do I explain this? he thought. Dickinson decided to be gentle but completely honest.
After handing the baby to the nurses, I talked to Wendy. I told her that I had some very unfortunate news. I then just simply told her that her baby girl had no arms and no legs. Wendy looked at me for a few moments without saying anything, as if she were processing what I had said. Then she said: ‘We’ll just have to look after her very well then.’
Dickinson’s eyes are full of tears now. ‘I’ve always thought that response was a measure of the woman and her family. They were lovely people.’
That same afternoon Dickinson went to his sister’s wedding. It was a difficult occasion for him. He and his wife had three young children, and throughout the wedding celebration his thoughts kept returning to Wendy Rowe and her baby. ‘It really cast a pall over things,’ he says. ‘Very distressing.’
Wendy Rowe was twenty-six years old at the time, and the baby was her third child. She and her husband Ian named her Lynette Suzanne and some of the doctors and nurses urged them to put her in an institution. The baby would not survive for long, they said. Forget about her. Go home and look after your other girls. Try and have another child as soon as possible.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Wendy and Ian took Lyn home from hospital and, true to Wendy’s word, took care of her. Full-time, round-the-clock care, often exhausting, sometimes backbreaking, always loving. Lyn needed help with everything, and always would. Eating, drinking, toileting, washing, dressing and every single other mundane detail of daily living. Without limbs she could do almost nothing for herself.
All of that lay ahead of Wendy and Ian when they took Lyn home from hospital in mid-March 1962. What they didn’t know then was that there was a simple explanation for what had happened to Lyn. She had fallen victim to what would become the most notorious drug in history: thalidomide.
Initially sold as a sleeping pill and sedative, thalidomide was developed in the 1950s by a German pharmaceutical company called Grünenthal. It granted sales licences for thalidomide to other companies, and salesmen sprinkled samples of the deadly drug like confetti in doctors’ surgeries around the world. One of those surgeries was in suburban Melbourne, just around the corner from the Rowes’ home, where Wendy Rowe presented herself just a few weeks into her pregnancy with Lyn. Wendy was at her wits’ end, anxious and overwhelmed by terrible morning sickness. ‘There was nothing “morning” about it,’ Wendy remembered. ‘I was sick the whole time. Morning, afternoon, evening and night.’
So Wendy’s GP, Dr Hugh Indian, a charming former footballer, gave her some pills to try: a new medication called Distaval, one of the many brand names for thalidomide. The pills were reputed to be ultra-effective and outstandingly safe. Wendy took them for about five weeks, but they didn’t work. The nausea and vomiting continued until the end of the pregnancy.
By the time Wendy Rowe took those thalidomide pills in mid-1961, the drug was a bestseller. But silently and inexorably it was exacting a terrible toll. When taken by women early in pregnancy, the drug attacked their unborn children: twisting, stunting and shortening limbs, causing deafness and blindness and internal injuries. Thousands of infants had already been born with malformations; many were stillborn or died shortly after birth. But the finger of blame had not yet been publicly pointed at thalidomide. Doctors around the world, Hugh Indian included, were still oblivious and happily handing out the drug to pregnant women.
A few weeks before the birth, Dr Indian examined Wendy and thought he felt two heads. ‘He looked really puzzled and kept feeling and poking. He told me that twins were a possibility. Later he told me he must have been feeling the baby’s head and the bottom. But with no legs near her bottom he thought he was feeling another head.’
Wendy’s recollection of the moments after Lyn’s birth is vivid.
Silence, just silence. During my first two daughters’ births there’d been congratulations and comments and chatter from the doctor and the nurses. This time there was just silence. Everyone seemed shocked. I thought to myself, ‘this isn’t good’. I knew something had happened, but I had no idea what. Then Dr Dickinson came over and spoke with me.
Wendy hesitates, remembering the news that changed everything.
I’m very glad [Dickinson] was so upfront with me. I know some mothers were just handed their baby in a swaddle and only discovered what had happened when they unwrapped their babies. He told me that he had something very sad to tell me. My baby did not have arms or legs. Well, what do you think about at a moment like that? I actually don’t remember if I said anything to him. I just remember thinking, we’re going to look after this little girl.
Lyn Rowe was among the most severely damaged of the thousands of thalidomide survivors. For her parents, as for thousands of others, the anticipated joy of welcoming a child into the world turned to grief and shock.
Wendy and Ian struggled on, caring for their daughter for more than five decades, as Lyn passed through infancy and childhood and into her teenage years and then into adulthood and on into middle age. Decades of heartbreak and sacrifice. Decades of scraping for enough money to get by while trying to ensure their other children did not feel neglected.
But what nobody ever imagined was that despite the tragedy of her profound disability, despite a brain injury she suffered as an infant as an indirect result of her missing limbs, and despite her family’s desperate financial circumstances, Lyn Rowe would ultimately emerge as a standard bearer for an unrecognised generation of thalidomiders.
In 2011 Lyn faced the two key thalidomide companies in court. Her legal battle with them would lift the lid on a fifty-year cover-up, exposing the outrageous misconduct that had caused such incalculable grief and suffering.
I was one of Lyn Rowe’s lawyers and from late 2010 until early 2014 I spent almost every working day focused on thalidomide. Over several years, Lyn’s small legal team amassed mountains of evidence to back her claim: documents buried in archives on three continents, interviews with elderly former drug-company employees, expert opinions from doctors and scientists, and new research emerging through thalidomide’s subsequent incarnation as a cancer drug.
Before becoming a lawyer, I had worked as a newspaper and television journalist. Frequently during the thalidomide litigation, I thought (and told everyone in the office) that Lyn’s story, and all that surrounded it, deserved a proper, public telling.
Thalidomide’s immediate victims were the damaged babies and their families. That in itself was appalling and heartbreaking, but there was so much more to the thalidomide story: disgraceful corporate behaviour, warnings ignored, World War II medical experiments, massively profitable companies and poverty-stricken victims. And then there was the Rowe family and their struggle over fifty years with the damage caused by the drug.
As the Rowe family revealed their private history to us, their lawyers, so too did thalidomide reveal its secrets. Ultimately our research yielded a wholesale rewriting of the most infamous chapter in pharmaceutical history, as secrets buried for up to fifty years were unearthed.
In July 2012 Lyn triumphed in her legal claim, receiving a confidential multimillion-dollar settlement, more than enough to provide her with first-class care for the rest of her life. She was also able to send her parents on a long overdue holiday.
Not long afterwards, Grünenthal trotted out its highly paid chief executive to offer an apology to the drug’s victims, fifty years after the event. It was, he said, Grünenthal’s ‘silent shock’ at what thalidomide had done that had rendered it unable to apologise for five decades.
An appalled Wendy Rowe appeared at a press conference, tearful but composed, to denounce the ‘apology’ as an insult to thalidomiders and their parents. ‘I suspect he might not know what shock is,’ she said. ‘Shock is having your precious child born without arms and legs. It’s accepting that your child is not going to have the life you wanted for her.’
That moment, as a dignified seventy-six-year-old woman highlighted the shameful behaviour of the German drug company, persuaded me to start writing the thalidomide story I had long been talking about.
Clearly I cannot pretend to impartiality. As a lawyer I was—unequivocally and enthusiastically—on the side of Lyn Rowe and her family and all of the other thalidomiders whose claims we pressed. I was also a participant in many of the current-day events reported in this book, and for that reason this account does not shy away from the first person. Though this book concerns a legal claim, it is not a legal text. A great deal of the minutiae (legal, medical) that obsessed the lawyers in the case, but would bore most everyone else, has been omitted.
What remains is important to telling the Rowe family’s story, integral to an account of Lyn Rowe’s legal battle fifty years after thalidomide deprived her of arms and legs, and critical to revealing the truth about history’s most infamous drug.
Finally, it should be clearly noted that there is an occupational hazard of the participant-as-author account: the inevitable inflation of the author’s contribution. That, I concede in advance, is the case here.