“For A Healthy Glow, Drink Radium!”

            While scientists were discovering and developing the atomic bomb “that would change the course of history,” the public was being introduced to one of the bombs key ingredients: radium. Many Americans and people the world over were being fed false information about Radium being a “miracle cure.” The promoters of radium claimed that it could be used for a plethora of ailments, from baldness to sexual impotence.

       Americans believed that their illnesses would be cured by inhaling or injecting radium into their bodies.

       One victim of radium was Eben Byers, a wealthy Pittsburgh native. Byers was encouraged, by his physician, to try Radithor to heal his wounded arm and because Byers believed that the radium-based liquid cured his arm he began drinking it daily. Byers claimed that the healing powers of the elixir not only cured his arm, but gave him a new sexual appetite and he began supplying the “cure” to his female friends. However, Byers’ health soon began to deteriorate and by 1931 Byers had become a victim of radium poisoning.

Newspaper article stating reason for Byers death

 Experts decided that his body was slowly decomposing. His upper jaw and most of his lower jaw were removed, and holes appeared in his skull. From there the end came quickly as he succumbed to radioactive poising.

  

        Other famous victims of the “harmless” element were the Radium Girls of Orange, New Jersey. (Orange, New Jersey is the same location that Bailey Laboratories was located.)These girls, like Byers, were unknowingly poisoned. In and around 1917, female factory workers were mislead into believing that the radium that they were working with was harmless. These women not only worked in an environment with radium, but also ingested large amounts of the element when licking paintbrushes covered in radium-based glow-in- the dark paint.

Female factory workers in radium dial factory (mid 1920s)

        In 1925, a New York Times article ran the headline, "New Radium Disease Found; Has Killed 5." The new disease was called, "radium necrosis," a polite term for the painful process of one's jaw disintegrating and developing tumors. The five killed by this so-called "new radium disease" were a handful of the girls who were instructed to put radium in their mouths by way of paintbrush. "Trust in radium unjustified," the article sources from a New York doctor. "Cancer called incurable." 

       Five of the factory workers filed lawsuits and although they received compensation for their trauma, all of the women died within a few short years of receiving the settlement.It was stories like Byers and the “Radium Girls” that ended the idea of radium as a “miracle cure” and led to the banning of radium in the 1960s.

Sources:

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History o the United States

Bill Kovarick and Mark Neuvil, http://66.147.244.135/~enviror4/people/radiumgirls/