The blessings of radium water made his head disintegrate
Robert Hiner Winn, an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission, approached the magnificent home at Southampton, Long Island on September 15, 1930 and knocked on the door.
The FTC was conducting interviews on the efficacy of a patent medicine and energy drink called Radithor, which was distilled water containing two radioactive substances, radium and mesothorium. The manufacturer, Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey, wildly claimed Radithor, in addition to being an excellent energy tonic, cured a variety of illnesses, including “backward development,” anorexia, hysteria, insomnia and dozens of others.
The beautiful home belonged to a 51-year-old Pittsburgh industrialist and sportsman named Eben MacBurney Byers. Byers had been an enthusiastic proponent of Radithor and reportedly consumed over 1,400 2-oz bottles of the tonic over a five-year period following an injury on a party train following a Yale-Harvard game in 1927. Winn was tasked with interviewing Byers at his home as he was reportedly too ill to appear at the hearing in person.
When Byers opened the door, Winn was horrified: half of his face was missing. Only two “chipmunk teeth” protruded from a bone fragment below his nose. His entire lower jaw and chin was gone, rotted away by radium poisoning. He even had openings in his skull, exposing his brain.
“A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine,” reported Winn in the April 11, 1932 edition of Time Magazine. “Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.”
It was Byers’ wealth and prominence that created such a scandal. He was chairman of the Pittsburgh firm A. M. Byers Co., makers of steel and wrought iron pipe. He was widely connected with the docks and with banking. He was a well-known sportsman, and in 1906 won the national amateur golf championship. For years he kept a private box at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. In England and the U.S., he owned racing stables. He was a superior marksman in trap shooting, and maintained homes not only at Southampton but in Pittsburgh and Aiken, South Carolina. He often vacationed at Florida’s Palm Beach.
A few years after its discovery by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898, and after never seeking a patent on their own discovery, America became radium crazy. The Standard Chemical Company formed a wholly owned subsidiary, the Radium Chemical Company, Inc., just to handle the sales of radium, and built a fully-stocked biological laboratory to investigate medical uses. The laboratory director, Dr. Frederick Proescher, treated many volunteer patients with radium to identify health conditions that responded most readily to radium treatments and the dosages required. In a series of papers published in 1913 and 1914, Proescher stated that he had injected 34 individuals with radium, and described his results for 16 subjects with arthritis.
One of the earliest outside advocates of radium was a physician, Dr. C. Everett Field, who served as manager of the Radium Chemical Company’s New York office. He enthusiastically published the virtues of radium therapy in medical journals and in his own pamphlets, and had a lucrative practice until the late 1920s. In one publication from 1926, Field stated that he had administered 6,000 intravenous radium treatments over the previous 12 years.
Just after Marie Curie visited America in 1921, business boomed as radium products became all the rage. One New York company, Associated Radium Chemists, produced radium tablets under the name “Arium.” American Endocrine Laboratories produced a device called the “Radiendocrinator,” which was a small radium-infused device to be placed wherever needed to restore that area to good “life and bodily health.” As an aid to male virility, one use instructed men to wear it “like an athletic strap” which put the instrument “under the scrotum as it should be. Radiate as directed.”
“Now Bubble Over with Joyous Vitality.”
Radium-infused lotions, hair products, gels, intravenous solutions (for injecting radium directly into the bloodstream) and even “Vita-radium suppositories” became widely hawked and sold in those pre-FDA days. Radium Hand Cleaner was advertised to “take off everything but the skin.” Magik (sic) Radium Ointment, when applied directly, “can confidently be expected to increase manly courage and vigor.” Vagatone brand radium-infused Gland Tablets were available for “female trouble.” An Alaskan bowling champion named Henry Kosmos sold a quilted muscle-relief sack containing low-grade uranium ore called “Cosmos Radioactive Pad.” A foreign company called A-Batschari even made radium cigarettes, to double your cancer chances.
Luckily for the gullible, radium-obsessed 1920s American consumer, many of these products were bogus and contained no real radium.
The most famous (and saddest) example of the perils of radium is the story of the “Radium Girls,” a group of female factory workers at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey who from 1917–1930 contracted radiation poisoning from painting clock and watch dials with radium-infused, glow-in-the-dark paint. Told by their employer that the paint was harmless, the women ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking (“pointing”) their paintbrushes to sharpen them. Their horrific experiences and subsequent lawsuits eventually led to sweeping changes in worker compensation laws.
Radithor was the invention of a discredited inventor and entrepreneur with a total of zero medical or scientific degrees named William J. A. Bailey. Bailey had frequent run-ins with the law from 1906 up until 1918, when he was fined for fraudulent claims concerning a supposed impotence cure called “Las-I-Go for Superb Manhood.” By 1922 he was back in business, however, setting up numerous radium-related laboratories, including Associated Radium Chemists, Inc. on Eighth Avenue in New York, where he manufactured the Arium tablets.
Bailey’s most financially successful operation, however, was Bailey Radium Laboratories, at 336 Main Street in East Orange, NJ, where he produced Radithor from 1925 to 1930. Radithor was sold by the 30-bottle case (a month’s supply) for $30 — a 400% markup. Each 2-oz bottle was claimed to contain triple distilled water guaranteed to contain at least 1 microcurie each of the radium 226 and 228 isotopes. In a move out of P.T. Barnum’s playbook, Bailey offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the product contained less than the stated amount of radium, which no one did.
Books and pamphlets sang the praises of Radithor, and not just those published by Bailey. In a 1926 book titled “Modern Rejuvenation Methods” by Dr. Charles Evans Morris, MD, he states “Radithor has so far exceeded any previous method of radium water treatment that it has been adopted in hospitals and clinics throughout the world. It gives the greatest possible efficiency in Alpha rays at the minimum expense and thus for the first time since the discovery of radioactivity it brings the blessings of radium water treatment of a highly scientific kind well within the reach of everyone … A child could take this product for years without the slightest injury.”
He went on report that “if any doctor or other person states that radium water is injurious he is not telling the truth … Out of millions of treatments given in these years we have yet to have a single record of harmful effects.”
This statement would be little comfort to Eben Byers. After injuring his arm in that 1927 fall, he complained of the dogged pain to a Pittsburgh physiotherapist, Charles C. Moyar, who suggested that he try Radithor, which was advertised at the time as “pure sunshine in a bottle.”
Dr. Moyar probably knew little of the medicinal qualities of Radithor, if at all, but he was incentivized by Bailey Laboratories to offer the radioactive tonic with a 17% rebate on every prescription dose. Ka-ching.
Believing he felt an immediate positive effect, Byers consumed three bottles a day of Radithor — three times the lethal radiation dose. His arm not only got better, but he experienced a return of the “male virility” for which he was well known in his Harvard days, when he was dubbed “sexy grandpa.”
Byers became not only an enthusiastic user of Radithor but an outspoken advocate of it. He sent cases of the tonic to his friends, including a woman named Mary S. Hill, and even gave it to his racehorses.
Then, in September, 1930, things started going wrong.
First, his friend Mary Hill died suddenly of mysterious causes. Shortly after that, and after consuming an estimated 1,400 bottles of Radithor (although a posthumous examination of the radioactivity in his body suggested he consumed far more), Byers began experiencing severe headaches and crushing pains in his jaw. Dr. Joseph Manning Steiner, a Manhattan x-ray specialist who had examined several of the “Radium Girls,” instantly recognized Byers’ condition — radium poisoning.
In a scene out of a most distressing horror movie, Byers’ life went to hell. All but just a few of his teeth fell out. His lower jaw started crumbling and it had to be removed, followed soon after by his upper jaw. Lesions formed on his brain, his skull soon began splitting open, and he was forced to wrap what remained of his disintegrating head in bandages just to hold the pieces together.
Because of Byers’ prominence, his grotesque illness led to dramatic reform of the radioactive patent medicine industry. The Federal Trade Commission order filed against Bailey Radium Laboratories on December 19, 1931, ordered the company to “cease and desist from various representations theretofore made by them as to the therapeutic value of Radithor and from representing that the product Radithor is harmless.”
Byers died March 31, 1932, with the cause of death listed as “necrosis of the jaw, abscess of the brain, secondary anemia, and terminal pneumonia.”
Byers’ physiotherapist who prescribed Radithor, Dr. Moyar, vigorously objected to his name being dragged through the mud in the case. A few days after Byers’ death, on April 2, the Associated Press reported Moyar protesting that the claims against Radithor were “an absolute lie.”
“… I never had a death among my patients from radium treatment … I have taken as much or more radium water of the same kind Mr. Byers took and I am 51 years old, active and healthy.”
Neither William Bailey nor Bailey Radium Laboratories were held responsible for Eben Byers’s death, but the company was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission. The findings against bogus patent medicine makers like Bailey granted the Federal Food & Drug Administration — which was primarily an agricultural regulatory commission — comprehensive authority to regulate drug and pharmacological practices and investigate bogus cure-all health claims.
It is estimated that over 400,000 bottles of Radithor were sold between 1925 and 1931, but only 80 users have been identified by the Argonne Center for Human Radiobiology, which tracks radiation deaths. One of those is Radithor inventor William Bailey, who died in 1949 at age 64 of carcinoma of the bladder. In 1970, his body was exhumed and found to still be radioactive.
Eben Byers’ body at the time of death was measured as containing 36 micrograms of radium, when ten micrograms are considered fatal. He is interred in a lead-lined coffin in the Byer Mausoleum, Section 13, Lot 67 at Pittsburgh’s Alleghany Cemetery. In 1965, his body was exhumed temporarily by the federal government for testing, and he was still dangerously radioactive.
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