Author(s): Michael Magazanik

Culture and Society

'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 Grunenthal - whose ruthless 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 villainy against a backdrop of heroic personal struggle and sacrifice.