The also made Charlton an unwitting subject in a grotesque government-sponsored medical experiment. On Nov. 27, 1945, according to records unearthed by The Albuquerque Tribune, doctors at Strong working for the Manhattan Project injected her with plutonium-239 to study how quickly the body rids itself of the radioactive substance. (The hospital never sanctioned the experiments.) Between 1945 and 1947, she and most of the 17 other patients in the secret program-11 of them in Rochester-received dosages of about .3 microcurie. That is about 43 times what is now regarded as the safe lifetime limit. Charlton wouldn’t learn of her official poisoning for another 30 years.
Family members say they suspected she was monitored during her routine checkups over the years at Strong. The visits often turned into stays lasting several days-even when it was clear she wasn’t all that ill. “They used to keep her in a section that was like a hotel,” says her son, Fred Schultz. Once his mother said that doctors placed her in a sealed room to check her body for radiation. Efforts to glean any information were always rebuffed. In the early 1970s, the family quizzed one doctor who’d treated Charlton since 1950. “When I asked her about plutonium, she’d say, ‘I don’t know a thing about it’,” recalled her daughter-in-law, Helen Schultz.
Hospital officials say they informed Charlton and other living victims of the experiment on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1974. The Schultzes say they learned about it from a doctor at Strong five years later. Doctors claim Charlton suffered no health problems from the radiation. She died of a heart attack in 1983. But Fred Schultz, now 73, remains bitter. “I was over there fighting the Germans who were conducting these horrific medical experiments,” he said. “At the same time my own country was conducting them on my mother.”
