Silent Shock, inevitably, draws heavily on research and interviews conducted in support of Lyn Rowe’s legal claim between 2010 and 2012. Once this book got off the drawing board, much further research and many more interviews (including follow-up interviews) were conducted. Many people, as is clear in the text, were exceedingly generous with their time. The documents referred to and quoted from in the text come from many sources, and these sources are often made explicit.
The legal team was able to inspect documents held by the Sunday Times, the Nordrhein-Westfalen state archive (then in Düsseldorf, now in Duisburg), the National Archives and National Library in Canberra, the National Archives in New Zealand, the United States Food and Drug Administration, and various libraries in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Lyn Rowe’s legal team also received (gratefully) valuable documents from thalidomiders (or their family members) in several countries. One such early document was a highly-prized complete copy of the German prosecutor’s 1000-page indictment. Other important documents related to the litigation in the United Kingdom and Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, plus a number of newspaper clippings collections kept by affected families.
After the conclusion of the litigation I was very fortunate to access one further, and especially valuable, store of documents. Elinor Kamath, an American woman, was working as a medical correspondent in Germany in 1961 when the thalidomide disaster became public. Multilingual, curious and extraordinarily bright, Kamath embarked on a twenty-five-year study of the medical aspects of the disaster. Later, while working at Stanford University, she won funding to turn her investigation into a book. During the 1980s Kamath interviewed Leslie Florence, the Scottish doctor who migrated to New Zealand and who had published on thalidomide’s neurotoxic effect in 1960. In 2012 Florence told me of Kamath and her work, but after inquiries I found Kamath had died in 1992. Then in 2014, by chance, I found on a book-sales website some proposed chapters Kamath had prepared for a potential publisher. Somehow thirty years later they had ended up for sale. I bought them, and, following clues, eventually found Kamath’s nephew Chris Kahn. He was first curious and then enormously helpful. In June 2014 I flew to the US to spend a week looking through the thalidomide treasures Kamath had assiduously assembled over a quarter of a century: contemporary documents, interviews with key players, trial transcripts. My only disappointment was for Elinor Kamath—despite all her effort she had never seen the publication of the book she had provisionally entitled Echo of Silence. In some key areas Silent Shock draws on Elinor Kamath’s work, and tribute is paid to her here.
Some other sources of material included the FDA’s oral history project—many interview transcripts are accessible via the agency’s website, including with some of the participants in the thalidomide affair and its legislative aftermath. A number of the important actors in thalidomide, principally Frances Kelsey, Widukind Lenz and Bill McBride, have left voluminous records, all of which were useful in recounting their roles.
Some other matters of note. In a very few places full names have been omitted. This has been done to protect the identity of thalidomide survivors who have not been prominent publicly and who may not have wished to be identified. In several places that meant using an initial only for a parent: i.e. Dr K, Mrs H etc.
‘Malformation’ is one of the most-used words in this text. Fifty years ago the chosen term was ‘deformed’ or ‘deformity’—words still used today but certainly not embraced by thalidomide survivors or by the disability community more broadly. The word ‘deformed’ and its variations have only been used when quoting, or because of context.
In accordance with Australian usage, the spelling ‘foetus’ has been used throughout—again, except when quoting documents in which the medical (and American) spelling ‘fetus’ was used.
And finally, German documents have been translated by qualified translators, sometimes by more than one. Where translations varied slightly, the more fluent English rendering has been preferred.