The Fatal Fountain Of Youth

Ever since the Curies discovered radium in 1898, science and the public have been fascinated with radium and all things radioactive. Today, disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident have made most people wary or plainly terrified of radiation. But in the early 1900s, radium was a marvelous novelty . . . a magical, glow-in-the-dark, all-natural cure-all. And there were plenty of people willing to market the new wonder drug.

Radium was viewed as a veritable fountain of youth, capable of curing everything from anemia to cancer. Physicians injected radium into their patients, and patent medicine companies did a thriving business in radioactive water. Foremost among these radioactive entrepreneurs was William J.A. Bailey, president of Bailey Radium Laboratories.

Bailey's company produced an enormously popular radioactive nostrum called Radithor. Each 16-milliliter bottle of triple-distilled water was guaranteed to contain radium and to be "harmless in every respect." Radithor's promotional literature listed more than 150 diseases that Radithor could cure or relieve-including impotence, frigidity, sexual weakness, and other sexual dysfunctions. Claims such as these made Radithor a huge success. Between 1925 and 1930 alone, an estimated 400,000 bottles of Radithor (and similar preparations) were sold worldwide.

Radithor fell from grace in mid-1932 when one of its best-known advocates the millionaire industrialist Eben MacBurney Byers died in Doctors' Hospital in New York. Byers was withered and anemic at the time of his death. His flesh, internal organs, and bone narrow had literally wasted away. The day after Byers died, "The New York Times" announced the medical examiner's findings. Eben M. Byers, millionaire, playboy, society gadabout, and veteran Radithor user (lie had consumed approximately 1,400 bottles), had died of radium poisoning.

Byers had already provided a statement for a Federal Trade Commission hearing on Radithor, which led to a cease-and-desist order against Bailey Radium Laboratories in late 1931. Byers' death prompted a wider investigation and a movement within the FDA for greater power to control products such as Radithor. Bailey Radium Laboratories eventually folded, and Bailey himself died of bladder cancer in 1949. He was sixty-four.

Nearly thirty years after Byers' death, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exhumed Byers' and Bailey's remains. Both skeletons were still radioactive.