A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr

Author:Jonathan Harr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction.Legal
ISBN: 0679772677
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1995-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

Schlichtmann got his chance in the final two weeks of discovery to hear the opinions of the medical experts hired by Cheeseman and Facher. Together they had assembled a roster of twenty-eight specialists, many with impressive résumés, several from the nearby Harvard Medical School. There were six toxicologists, five epidemiologists, three neurologists, a molecular biologist, a pediatric hematologist, a cardiologist, a psychiatrist, and several immunologists, chemists, and pathologists. Schlichtmann had no time to take leisurely six-day-long depositions, as Facher and Cheeseman had. One day during the last week of discovery he took eight depositions, walking into conference rooms to confront expert witnesses whose specialties—whose very names—he did not know.

He found that several of these doctors knew his own experts, sometimes personally, sometimes only by reputation. One physician, a specialist in occupational medicine, told Schlichtmann that he had often referred patients to Dr. Robert Feldman’s clinic.

“What’s your opinion of Dr. Feldman?” Schlichtmann asked this expert.

“He strikes me as a good neurologist,” replied the doctor. “I depend on his judgment considerably.”

Schlichtmann planned to use this in front of the jury, even though this same doctor stated that he did not believe the Woburn families had suffered any ill health from exposure to TCE. “I’ve seen individuals working with levels of exposure a thousand—ten thousand—times the levels you have quoted without suffering any ill effect,” the doctor said.

A neurologist, a professor at Harvard, agreed that Feldman was, in his words, a “competent” neurologist, but he, too, disagreed with Feldman’s conclusions. He thought Feldman had completely misinterpreted the results of the blink reflex tests. “I think the normal ranges, as construed by Dr. Feldman, were excessively low,” said this neurologist. Another Harvard professor, a pediatrician, said much the same thing about Colvin’s T cell tests. This expert acknowledged that Colvin had an “impeccable” reputation, but he thought Colvin had used “rather low” laboratory normals in assessing the Woburn families’ T cell values.

The cardiologist hired by Facher and Cheeseman was an eminent doctor by any measure. His name was Gilbert Horton Mudge, Jr., a professor at Harvard and director of the heart transplant program at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Schlichtmann asked Dr. Mudge if he had reviewed the cardiological exams of the Woburn families. Mudge said that he had.

“Were any of those people suffering from cardiac arrhythmia?” asked Schlichtmann.

“I believe all those patients were normal,” replied the doctor.

“Are any of them suffering from cardiac arrhythmia?” Schlichtmann asked again.

“Their rhythm disturbances are within normal limits,” said Mudge.

Mudge still had not answered the question. Schlichtmann asked it again, for a third time: “Are any of these people suffering from cardiac arrhythmia?”

“Yes,” said Mudge.

“How many of them are suffering from cardiac arrhythmia?”

“As I remember, virtually all of them had some cardiac arrhythmia. But it’s my opinion that such rhythm disturbances are entirely consistent with a normal patient population.”

Near the end of the deposition, which lasted less than an hour, Mudge said he would like to take echocardiograms of the Woburn people. “I’d like to look at their echocardiograms to see if there’s any objective evidence to suggest a structural abnormality of the heart.

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