Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  Byers began taking the medicine. When his arm pain improved, he became convinced that Radithor had increased his vitality. He began drinking three bottles of Radithor a day in December 1927, three times the recommended daily amount. It was a luxury unique to his financial situation because the average person couldn’t afford to keep up that kind of dosage. And that was a good thing—by 1931, the industrialist had built up radiation dosage levels equivalent to receiving several thousand X-rays.

  Unfortunately for Byers, this level of radiation didn’t turn him into a Marvel superhero. It slowly—and gruesomely—killed him.

  Radithor, with 2 microcuries of radium in triple-distilled water. Byers drank three of these every day.

  Behold, the Power of Radium!

  Famously discovered and isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie—who ultimately gave their health, and in Marie’s case, her life, for this scientific breakthrough—radium was embraced by the medical community of the early twentieth century for its striking ability to destroy cancerous cells. Of course, the problem with radium is that it’s less like a heat-seeking missile and more like a nuclear bomb. It can affect any cell it encounters, cancerous or not.

  Before the dangers of radium were fully understood, however, the element enjoyed a brief life (half-life?) as the celebrity element du jour. In 1902, the Curies first isolated radium chloride from a uranium-rich mineral and ore now called “uranite.” (A quick primer: As uranium decomposes, it transforms into other elements. Radium is just a stop on the one-way decomposition train from uranium to lead.) The new element, which Marie called “my beautiful radium,” glowed with both radioactivity and medical promise. Radium had a half-life of sixteen hundred years and had a radioactivity level of about three thousand times that of uranium. It was enormously rare and enormously intriguing. (And enormously dangerous, but we’ll get to that later.)

  Less than a year later, while commenting on radium’s ability to cause deep flesh burns, Pierre Curie suggested that it might have potential to treat cancer. Initial results were very promising, particularly with skin cancers. The next year, 1904, saw John MacLeod, a physician at Charing Cross Hospital in London, developing radium applicators for treatment of internal cancers as well, which shrank tumors.

  It’s difficult to overstate the importance of that discovery. After losing the war against cancer for centuries, we finally had an ally. And it even glowed! So it was no surprise that, in addition to treating cancer, physicians in the early twentieth century experimented with using radium for hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, rheumatism, gout, and tuberculosis.

  Despite the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, radium remained entirely unregulated because it was classified as a natural element rather than as a drug. And so quacks across the country began exploiting radium’s mysterious qualities for their own gain. (Advertisements sprang up in newspapers: “Radiate Youth and Beauty,” “Radium is Restoring Health to Thousands,” and “Remarkable New Radium Cream Liniment Drives Out Pain from Aching Joints and Muscles Instantly!”)

  The only saving grace was that radium was extremely expensive because of its scarcity. As a result, the vast majority of radioactive products peddled by quacks around the United States did not actually contain any radioactive ingredients at all, a quirk of the supply and demand process that undoubtedly saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

  Marie Curie aglow with her “beautiful radium.”

  Radon, the Revigator, and Other Crocks

  The first wave of radioactive products to hit over-the-counter markets were water based. Medical opinion had landed on radon (the gas produced by decomposing radium) as the curative, life-giving property in hot springs that were popular around the turn of the twentieth century—especially the famous springs in Arkansas (see box, “Radium Spa Hotels,” page 55). No one really knew what it was about the hot springs that made them curative, but once the presence of radon was identified, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that radioactivity was responsible. Radon, however, had a serious problem. It can only temporarily remain in water before it either decays or evaporates into the air.

  Today, we explicitly try to remove radon from our drinking water (obviously). But in the early twentieth century, a lively trade sprang up in devices built to do the exact opposite. In addition to soaking in radon-laced pools, many people believed drinking radioactive water was generally a good idea, sort of the equivalent of downing a green drink today. One of the most successful devices to add radon to water was the Revigator, invented by R. W. Thomas and patented in 1912. The Revigator was described as a “radioactive water crock,” which was essentially true—it was a large jar made of radium-containing uranium ore with an attached spigot. Consumers were instructed to fill the jar every night and “drink freely,” averaging between six and seven glasses each day. The Revigator became your very own home radioactive spring, guaranteed to produce a “health-giving drink.” And if you had any leftover water at the end of the day? Advertisements encouraged consumers to water their plants!

  One of the problems with the Revigator—besides slowly poisoning people with about five times the radium concentration recommended for drinking water—was its lack of portability. Several similar but smaller devices sprang onto the market, including the Thomas Cone, the Zimmer Emanator, and the Radium Emanator, all of which operated on the similar principle that you simply plopped them into water you were about to drink. (These devices, collectively dubbed “emanators,” were typically manufactured from carnotite ore, a primary ore of uranium. The uranium would gradually decompose, producing radium and radon gas in turn, which then infused the water to make it radioactive.) At last, you could make radioactive water anywhere. Traveling salesmen could rest assured that their drinking water at night in their roadside motel was suitably irradiated.

  As the relationship between radon and radium began to be understood more clearly (in terms of radioactive potency, radium is basically radon squared), it wasn’t long before manufacturers began to release products allowing consumers to directly consume radium or apply it to their skin. Throughout the 1920s, a variety of radium-based cosmetics were released on the market, including beauty creams, salves, soaps, and toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste. It wasn’t enough to have white teeth in the 1920s; those little pearls had to glow.

  Radium cigarettes, anyone?

  “Ionizing Your Glands” with Jockstraps and Suppositories

  Medical controversy reigned over how exactly radioactivity benefited the human body. Some claimed that radium worked by direct application to diseased parts; others thought it stimulated the endocrine system, particularly the adrenal and thyroid glands. For a time, consensus landed on the idea that healthy human functioning relied upon ionizing radiation, that is, X-rays and gamma rays.

  Before producing Eben Byers’s precious Radithor, William Bailey invented the “Radiendocrinator,” a gold-plated harness containing radium that the patient (or victim) could wear around whatever body part was in need of rejuvenation. The Radiendocrinator, you see, produced gamma rays that would “ionize the endocrine glands.” The idea was that ionizing (i.e., irradiating) the endocrine system would increase hormone production. Or, as it was better understood by its less enlightened audience, the device worked by “lighting up dark recesses of the body.” The Radiendocrinator could even be worn under the scrotum in a special jock strap rigged up to energize uninspired penises.

  In 1924, Bailey reached the zenith of his career with a wildly optimistic speech about radium’s medicinal potential before the American Chemical Society. He told them: “We have cornered aberration, disease, old age, and in fact life and death themselves in the endocrines.” Bailey believed (or at least claimed to believe, as Bailey’s true beliefs are obscured behind his marketing) that aging was caused by the gradual decline of the endocrine glands. By irradiating or “ionizing” them, radium could revitalize them, which in turn would restore some luster to the aged and decrepit. He added:

  I am s
atisfied from definite clinical experience with the Radiendocrinator that a method of ionization is now available whereby we can definitely, practically without exception, retard the progress of senescence and give a new lease of relatively normal functioning power to those whose sun of life is slowly sinking into the purple shadows of that longest night… . The wrinkled face, the drawn skin, the dull eye, the listless gait, the faulty memory, the aching body, the destructive effects of sterility, all spell imperfect endocrine performance.

  Bailey wasn’t the only one focused on the relationship between radium and glands. Home Products, a company based in Denver, Colorado, had the diabolically brilliant idea of combining animal gland tablets and radium supplements for potent cures to help “weak discouraged men bubble over with joyous vitality.”

  The men who had the unfortunate experience of taking Vita Radium certainly bubbled over with something, because those radium supplements were suppositories. Radium suppositories. Patients were literally putting radium up their own asses.

  The women, however, had it worse. In an effort to combat that eternal feminine problem of “sexual indifference,” Home Products produced “Women’s Special Suppositories.” When inserted vaginally, these radium suppositories were claimed to cure all manner of sexual afflictions and, what’s more, reinvigorate their sexual appetites.

  Man with neck cancer receiving radiotherapy from a “radium bomb” in Belgium, 1925. The bomb produced radiation from thirteen sources, each focusing on the tissue from a different angle.

  The Gruesome Death of an Industrialist

  By the end of 1927, Eben Byers, our wealthy industrialist, was routinely drinking several bottles of Radithor each day, convinced it was responsible for the improvement in his health. With all the zeal of a recent convert, Byers began sending cases of Radithor to his friends, colleagues, and female “acquaintances” with his enthusiastic stamp of approval. (One of whom, Mary Hill, preceded him in death, likely from the radiation as well.) He was so completely taken with the patent medicine that he even fed some to his favorite racehorses. For perhaps the only time in history, you could watch a radioactive horse at the tracks in the late 1920s.

  Over the next five years, Byers consumed an astonishing fifteen hundred bottles of Radithor. By 1931, his body was literally destroying itself from the inside out. The last eighteen months of his life were straight out of a horror film.

  When the once strong and robust ladies’ man finally died from the multiple radiation-based cancers raging through his body, on March 31, 1932, he weighed a scant ninety-two pounds. His kidneys had completely failed, leaving his skin sallow and sunken. His brain had abscessed, rendering him nearly mute but entirely lucid. Most of his jaw had been removed by surgeons in failed attempts to stop the spread of cancer. And his skull was riddled with holes from the radiation.

  “A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine,” wrote an observer, commenting on a visit to Byers’s Long Island mansion in the final stages of his radiation poisoning. A forensic investigation upon Byers’s death revealed that even his own bones were dangerously radioactive. The playboy literally had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin.

  Byers’s high-profile demise was a watershed moment and led to a full FDA investigation into Radithor and, subsequently, a Federal Trade Commission cease-and-desist order halting its production. Every bottle then available in stores around the country was removed, and government pamphlets were distributed nationally warning about the dangers of consuming the product. By the early 1930s, the formerly lucrative market in radium patent medicines had almost entirely collapsed.

  Despite his company receiving the cease-and-desist, Bailey was never actually prosecuted for Byers’s death. The scam artist maintained that it was a case of misdiagnosis, citing his own regular consumption of Radithor: “I have drunk more radium water than any man alive, and I have never suffered any ill effects.” Bailey slipped off into obscurity, dying in Massachusetts in 1949 at the relatively young age of sixty-four. His cause of death—bladder cancer—was a likely by-product of his own radiation poisoning. Bailey’s body, exhumed in 1969, was found to be highly radioactive, so the quack was right about one thing: He practiced what he preached.

  Radium Today

  Meanwhile, on the legitimate medical front, many of the early radium experimenters (including the Curies) had begun to develop radiation-induced health problems as well. The dangers to the medical field in handling the substance, combined with the dangers to the patients if given imprecise doses, soon overwhelmed its healing potential.

  Help came, however, in the form of the Geiger counter in 1928, which allowed scientists to successfully measure radioactivity levels, a crucial safety development as they continued to investigate radium. Radium was applied to tumors by enclosing it in tiny glass tubes, in turn put inside platinum containers, and then plunged into the diseased tissue. The platinum containers block the undesirable alpha and beta rays, while allowing the useful gamma rays through. Similarly, with the introduction of radon sealed in gold tubes (called seeds) in the 1940s, physicians were also able to successfully experiment with radium’s decay product. (The gold worked as the platinum did, allowing just the gamma rays to escape.) The dangers, however, from leaking gas or contaminated samples, eventually led to the discontinuation of most radium from medicinal use by the 1980s. It still has its place, however—radium223 is currently a standard therapy for certain stages of prostate cancer. Today, radiation treatment (aka radiotherapy) is most commonly delivered as ionizing radiation beams. In this form, it remains one of the primary treatments for cancer, along with surgery and chemotherapy.

  In a curious postscript, in 1989 scientist Roger Macklis investigated the radioactivity of a bottle of Radithor he had purchased at a medical antiques shop and wrote about the surprising results in Scientific American: “I assumed that … Radithor’s residual activity had decayed to insignificance long ago. I was wrong. Tests … revealed that almost 70 years after it had been produced, the nearly empty bottle was dangerously radioactive.”

  The irradiated bones of Eben Byers, slowly decomposing in a lead-lined coffin, underscore that point.

  Radium Spa Hotels

  Taking a soak in a radioactive spring was a favorite method for absorbing radiation. As it became understood that radon was the gas produced by decomposing radium and that some hot springs emanated that very gas, hotels started popping up nearby so people could get in on the radioactive water action.

  At the Radium Spa Hotel in Joachimsthal, Czech Republic, not only could you soak in irradiated water, but you could also inhale radon directly through air tubes connected to a processing tank in the basement. Even the interior air at the hotel was purposefully irradiated.

  Another such hotel opened up in Will Rogers’s hometown, Claremore, Oklahoma, when a sulfuric spring was discovered and marketed as “radioactive” even though it actually, well, wasn’t. But that didn’t stop the town and hotel from becoming a major tourist destination in the early twentieth century when radiation was all the rage.

  The Women’s Health Hall of Shame

  Throughout history, the medical care of women has mostly been determined by men. Women have been considered physiologically and psychologically inferior (a sarcastic thanks to Aristotle for asserting that “the woman is a failed man”). Female organs were thought to be the corrupted, inverted version of men’s, and women were “leaky vessels” (menstruating, crying, lactating). Menstruating was “polluting.”

  For millennia, many considered the uterus to be the anatomical and pathological basis of most female ailments. The organ was thought to be extremely high maintenance (even though it self-purged via menses), and it “wandered” hither and thither, causing all sorts of trouble while galloping around the body.

  Good God. Get a leash for that womb already. Maybe a shock collar or an electric fence, before it flies off to Bali with some loose testicles. Meanwhile, we’ll take a look at how women
’s ailments have been treated (poorly) throughout time.

  Late-nineteenth-century photos depicting hysteria.

  Scent Treatments

  The term hysteria (from the Greek word hystera, for womb) is actually a more recent term from the 1800s, but the idea of a mischievous, wandering womb goes back to ancient times. Hysteria included symptoms of faintness, insomnia, abdominal discomfort, spasms, loss of interest in sex, increased interest in sex—basically, any problem could be pinned on it. The Ebers Papyrus (1550 bce) thought that fixing many female problems was a simple matter of making that elusive uterus move back to where it belonged by chasing it about with odors. Uterus “too high” up in the abdomen? Place some stinky feet or other malodorous substances at the nose to drive that organ downward. Or place sweet scents near the vagina to lure it closer. In the nineteenth century, ladies carried around smelling salts (sal volatile), with the hope that sniffing them would put that pesky uterus right and—bonus!—prevent a swoon.

  Hysterectomies and Clitoridectomies

  Surgical removal of the ovaries to treat hysteria began in the nineteenth century. It would be nice to think this was all a clever plan by women wishing to control their own fertility, but the surgery often occurred without the patient’s consent.

  In mid-1880s London, prominent gynecologist Isaac Baker Brown decided that anything that nourished or gratified a woman’s sexual appetite was bad, bad, bad. He recommended and performed clitoris removals and even chopped out his sister’s ovaries. This clitoridectomy procedure existed into the twentieth century (and is now one of many horrendous procedures termed female genital mutilation, still existing in numerous countries). One patient in 1944 had the procedure done and stated, “They tried to keep me from masturbating.” She added, “Didn’t work.”