Silent Shock: The Men Behind the Thalidomide Scandal and an Australian Family's Long Road to Justice

by Michael Magazanik

Overview

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.

Lyn Rowe was born in Melbourne in 1962, seven months after her mother Wendy was given a new wonder drug for morning sickness called thalidomide.

For fifty years the Rowe family cared for Lyn. Decades of exhausting, round-the-clock work. But then in 2011 Lyn Rowe launched a legal claim against the thalidomide companies. Against the odds, she won a multi-million-dollar settlement.

Former journalist Michael Magazanik is one of the lawyers who ran Lyn’s case. In Silent Shock he exposes a fifty-year cover up concerning history’s most notorious drug, and details not only the damning case against manufacturers Grünenthal—whose enthusiastic promotion of their lucrative drug in the face of mounting evidence beggars belief—but also the moving story of the Rowe family.

Spanning Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Sweden and, of course, Germany, Silent Shock is an epic account of corporate wrongdoing against a backdrop of heroic personal struggle and sacrifice.

Michael Magazanik has worked as a journalist for the Age, the Australian and ABC-TV, and is now a lawyer with Slater & Gordon. He lives in Melbourne with his partner and three children.

‘Magazanik exposes myths and concealments on a grand scale… A compelling read. Highly recommended.’ BookMooch

‘Magazanik—a lawyer on the Rowes’ legal team and a former journalist—has woven an extraordinary story…Magazanik has moulded [the Rowes'] story into a modern Australian myth, the battlers who took on the pharmaceuticals and won.' Age/Sydney Morning Herald

‘A harrowing read of the damage wrought by this infamous drug.’ WA Today

‘A frightening account of secrets in the pharmaceutical industry and the inspiring story of a family and their legal team that just wouldn't give up.’ Law Society Journal

‘Silent Shock is an ambitious, important book…Magazanik does an excellent job.’ Australian Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781925095098
Publisher:	The Text Publishing Company
Publication date:	05/22/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Michael Magazanik has worked as a journalist for the Age, the Australian and ABC-TV, and is now a lawyer with Slater & Gordon. He lives in Melbourne with his partner and three children.

Read an Excerpt

March 1962

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 the 50 years since have vanished. The elderly doctor is young again, back at the Box Hill Hospital on that late-summer morning.

“I’d just delivered a baby when the senior mid-wife came over and asked me if I could step in and help out with another delivery. The woman’s doctor couldn’t be found. Of course I agreed. The missing doctor was a partner in our medical practice and the patient was Wendy Rowe. I knew Wendy and her family, liked them, and was more than happy to help out.”

Ron Dickinson pauses. It is April 2011 and he has not told this story often. He is now 85 and living a happy retirement, a long and satisfying medical career well behind him. Home is a big house perched high on a green bluff with commanding views of Australia’s wild southern ocean. A perfect place to retire. Nearby is a pretty winery and he and his companions are seated at a wooden table in a shaded court yard. The doctor’s visitor has asked for his memories of that single traumatic day, decades earlier. Dickinson, who has barely touched his lunch, pushes it aside. A thoughtful man with a gentle manner, he becomes halting when describing the events which followed on 2 March 1962.

"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. 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 had not seen anything like that before.”