Rachel Lance

And so they just kept exposing themselves to this over and over, especially these high oxygen pressures.

They were having seizures.

They were breaking spines.

Two of them broke their spines.

They were dislocating their jaws.

One of them, Helen Spurway, dislocated her jaw five times in the same dive, and they kept going.

These are things that would be wildly unethical and illegal today.

And they were doing it because they were in this context of the blitz and the bombings and the horrors of World War II happening around them.

Nobody knew.

And this is classic with the world of injuries and extreme environments.

You don't know what's going to be a problem until somebody goes first.

And that's true with so much of science, with so much of testing and the amount of research that we do.

People have been talking about...

Artificial kidney and kidney transplant from a pig and the ethics of that.

And the brutal reality is you can do benchtop testing until you die.

But nobody really knows what will happen in a human body until, like the Brooklyn Bridge, someone just goes first.

And so those unfortunate caisson workers, yeah, they were the first ones who were really experiencing decompression sickness and experiencing how brutal and lethal that can be.

Not as far as I'm aware for the bridge.

They sort of just powered through.

They were having all these deaths and they just hired more workers, which is perhaps why a lot of the workers there started quitting toward the end of the project.