The Brooklyn Bridge stands as a timeless monument to 19th-century ingenuity, a majestic web of steel wire suspending a road over the treacherous East River. But beneath its soaring Gothic towers lies a dark, submerged history of unimaginable physical suffering and terrifying medical mystery.To anchor the bridge's massive stone towers, workers had to excavate the riverbed inside enormous, compressed-air wooden boxes called caissons. As they toiled in these claustrophobic, high-pressure chambers, they began to emerge with bizarre, agonizing symptoms: debilitating joint pain, paralysis, and...