The Federal Trade Commission, which already was investigating the “radium cures,” promised to ramp up its inquiry, and health officials in major cities, including Chicago Board of Health President Herman Bundesen, vowed to crack down on sellers of radium preparations.Fake radioactive patent medicine A bottle of Radithor at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in New Mexico, United States Byers, at 51, was found to have “necrosis in both jaws, anemia and a brain abscess, all symptomatic of radium poisoning,” the Tribune reported a few days after he died in late March 1932. The industrialist, advised by a doctor in response to his nagging arm injury, had been a daily drinker of the radium beverage Radithor for two years. What turned the tide against radium water and its sellers was the jarring death of wealthy steel mogul Eben M. The affected women of the Radium Dial factory in Ottawa, 80 miles southwest of Chicago, became known as the “Radium Girls” and “Ottawa’s living dead.” Not all died premature deaths, but their suffering led to changes in industry. Several sickened women sued the watch companies in two states, including Illinois, and won settlements. The women, as part of their routine, would place the paintbrushes in their mouths to “point” the bristles and in doing so would ingest a small amount of the radium paint. The culprit was the luminous radium-containing paint used to create glow-in-the-dark watch and clock dials. Medical attention in many cases failed to stop the horrifying decay, and several women died. A celebrity death that same year, tied to radium water, would finally rouse government to action to halt the sale of medicinal radium preparations.īut years before that headline-making event, it was young working-class women who came to serve as the tragic bellwether for radium poisoning.Īs early as 1925, newspaper articles noted the alarming case of female workers in watch dial factories suffering a degeneration of the tissues of the jaw. Deaths from repeat exposure were mounting. When a Tribune reporter paid Gable a visit in 1932, the Chicago-area resident offered his visitor a highball, assuring him that “the reported deaths from drinking radium water are due not to the presence of radium, but rather to a cheap (radioactive) substitute, mesothorium.”īut there most certainly was a dark side to radium. He regularly drank a radium “highball,” fruit juice containing emanations, to maintain peak physical condition, the Tribune said. Gable of the Detroit Institute of Technology reported to an audience at a 1931 lecture that a radium-infused beverage was the cornerstone of his health regimen. Renowned doctors touted the benefits of this “elixir of life” and its healing effect on their patients. (The cost of a container may have been within reach of the average person, but radium didn’t come cheap in 1914, according to a doctor’s column in the Tribune, the market price for a single grain of radium was about $5,000. The Tribune predicted that an apparatus for making radium water would become a must-have in a few years. According to a 1913 Tribune brief, the medicinal beverage was created by pouring water into an “earthenware receptacle” containing a small amount of radium, which eventually “charged” the water with emanations. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)Įven more captivating to the affluent members of society was the introduction of radium water. An annotated photo shows some products spawned by the radioactivity craze: 1) uranium wonder glove 2) Radiumchema pad 3) radium spectacles 4) Rotor Plac 5) radium chocolates 6) radium suppositories 7) Radium Rem, a brick 8) uranium ore pack and 9) Radium Life pad.
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