A visit to the dentist confirmed a gruesome fact: Fryer’s jaw was decaying. The pain intensified, and one by one, Grace Fryer lost her teeth. But William Bailey didn’t quite get the same easy escape as in 1949 at the age of 64 he died of bladder cancer.In the slide show above, Elaine Vaan Hogue discusses Radium Girls. 33 years later in 1965 his body was exhumed and found to still be highly radioactive.īailey’s company, The Radium Institute was never prosecuted for Byers’s death, only for false advertising, an easy escape. The radioactive drug was finally pulled from shelves but the damage was too late because by this point over 400,000 bottles had been sold worldwide.īyers’s autotomy had revealed that his bones and teeth were highly radioactive and so it was decided that he was to be buried in a lead-lined coffin to stop the radium from leaking out. But the shocking fact is that even with the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation and Byers’s death many people continued using Radithor well into the 1930s. This was after The Federal Trade Commission had issued a cease-and-desist letter to Bailey. In 1932 Byers died a horribly painful death. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.” He added, “A more gruesome experience … would be hard to imagine.” Deadly Poison One investigator reported, “His whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. To their horror, he was a lot more ill than he had previously claimed.Įben Byers lost his entire jaw (Cult of Weird / CC BY-SA 4.0 ) So naturally when Byers, a public figure, began to report dangerous side effects related to the drug they were quick to assess his condition. Weight loss, toothaches, and headaches were some of the concerning symptoms that Byers described.īy this stage, both the radioactive medicine, Radithor, and William Bailey were under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. However, one year on in 1930, the negative effects of consuming massive doses of the extremely radioactive material started to become apparent. Two years into his Radithor treatment he was consuming three bottles daily amounting to a total consumption of a whopping 1,400 bottles of the medicine. What Was Silphium? Lost Wonder Drug of the Romans.The Poison Squad Trials: Do You Know What’s In Your Food?.It’s even reported that he gifted cases of this medicine to his business associates and went so far as to give it to his racehorses in the hope it would give them a competitive advantage. So confident in the medicine he advocated for it to everybody and everyone with whom he came into contact. And, at first, it seemed to him to be everything that he had been promised.īyers observed changes not only in his arm but also in his energy level and muscle tone right away. He had been suffering from an injury that was not healing well when his physician recommended, that he try using Radithor to aid in the recovery process. Their discovery was deemed so significant that in 1911 they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. But it was particularly the green glowing radium that caught the attention of the world. The year was 1898, and word had broken that two new elements radium and polonium had been discovered by scientists Marie and Pierre Curie. The special ingredient that launched Radithor into global success was a newly discovered element taking the world by storm: radium. Why did people believe that this medicine could treat so many different diseases? Surely people would question whether this was possible.
Not even reports of people’s jaw disintegrating would be enough to deter people from using this radioactive medicine. People waited in line to purchase Radithor, a super drug that was advertised as having almost universal cures. Sounds too good to be true, and indeed it was. Imagine you were told that over 140 different illnesses, including blindness, asthma, hysteria, stomach issues, cancer, and impotence, could all be treated by a single miraculous drug.
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