One after another, the case histories of the plaintiffs looked astonishingly alike. Conibear told Schlichtmann that the pattern of chronic solvent poisoning was unmistakable. She had conducted a computer search of scientific journals and found more than a hundred articles on the toxic effects of TCE. Most of those articles dealt with workers who’d been exposed to the solvent, and they cited the same constellation of symptoms—dizziness, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, skin rashes. Among the Woburn families, any one person might have the misfortune to suffer repeated rashes, chronic abdominal pains and nausea, and sinus and upper-respiratory-tract infections. But for a group of families, related to each other only by geography and the water they used, to suffer so many common ailments and to have a leukemic child in the family—to Schlichtmann, that could not be coincidence.

Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action, loc. 1071