RADIUM POISONING ARCHIVE
William Bailey, The Man Who Prescribed Byers Radithor, Was A Known Fraud Photo: Internet Archive Book Images/ Wikimedia Commons /No Restrictions In fact, Byers was so keen on the product and its supposed benefits that he ended up drinking three bottles every day for two years, until the poison caught up with him and began dissolving him from the inside out. At a time when radium-infused products were very popular, it was unsurprising that Byers was more than happy to take Radithor. Radithor was simply radium dissolved in water, marketed as a healing tonic. The pain didn’t go away, so Byers’s doctor prescribed him Radithor. In 1927, Byers was on a train returning from a Harvard-Yale football game when he fell from his bunk and hurt his arm. This was the title of a Wall Street Journal article that came out some time after Byers’s passing, succinctly summing up what happened to him.
“The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off” Photo: BlueShift 12/ flickr /CC-BY 2.0 Like the ill-fated Radium Girls before him, Byers demonstrated the clear and unequivocal bodily evidence that exposure to radium was lethal.īyers’s tragic death is a story of medical deception and overdose, and it serves as a cautionary tale that there is, in fact, too much of a good thing – especially if that good thing is actually completely lethal.
His teeth fell out his jaw had to be removed holes formed in his brain and skull and he eventually perished in 1932 from radium poisoning. Instead, after three years of incessant use, Byers began rotting from the inside. Yet what happened to Byers fell far afield of the positive effects Radithor was supposed to have. Radithor was supposed to alleviate aches, pains, and even invigorate one sexually. When Byers fell and hurt his arm in 1927, he was prescribed Radithor, a radium-infused elixir sold by a quack doctor named William Bailey. Eben Byers was an amateur golfer, an alumnus of Yale, and a notorious ladies man, but he is most famous for literally rotting from the inside out after spending three years drinking radium-infused water.
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