62 pages 2 hours read

Jonathan Harr

A Civil Action

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1995

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The Woodshed

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Summary: “The Woodshed”

1

 

Schlichtmann puts a woman named Patti D’Addieco in charge of collecting the medical records of the Woburn families. This was the idea of a doctor named Shirley Conibear, who specialized in health problems of industrial workers who had been exposed to toxins. Conibear comes to Woburn and performs tests on all twenty-eight of the family members. Between the medical records and Conibear’s tests, the patterns are strikingly similar: Conibear believes that the evidence is unmistakable.

 

Next, Schlichtmann decides to send seventeen members of the families to a Boston cardiologist named Saul Cohen, for another battery of more extensive testing. Cohen says that he will be willing to testify but does not expect to find anything damning. He is skeptical that the low levels of TCE being discussed could result in the grave pathologies of the Woburn families. All seventeen are revealed to experience irregular heartbeats.

 

Conibear is convinced that the frequency of the symptoms indicates neurological damage. Schlichtmann hires a neurologist named Robert G. Feldman. Feldman is also skeptical. Schlichtmann reads all of Feldman’s papers concerning the long-term hazards of TCE exposure. All of his previous research concluded that even a single acute exposure to TCE indicates the likelihood of permanent neurological deficits.