The Radioactive Power of Advertising
When Pharma Shilled Radiation and People Melted
This is a Carousel guest post by a Twitter anon.
When it comes to radioactive materials, it's a mixed bag. A nuclear power plant can provide energy to half a million homes. A nuclear bomb can obliterate just as many. Radiation is a valuable tool to diagnose and treat disease, but too much exposure to it can lead to death via body horror. In the early 1900's there was a rush to develop and market an assortment of products that touted the health benefits of radioactive decay before anyone truly understood its dangers. This misapplication of scientific discovery entwined the fates of Eben Byers and William J. A. Bailey, ultimately leading to their death and changing public perception of radioactivity forever. This is a story of Radioactive Quackery.
It’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when business interests become enamored with a new scientific discovery and try to exploit it without due diligence. It's also a testament to the power of advertising. Radioactive health tonics became all the rage in the 1920's thanks to pervasive advertising campaigns proclaiming the health values of what was essentially poison.
When Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898, they observed the isotope destroyed diseased cells faster than it did healthy ones. Because of this, they hypothesized that the newly-discovered element could have value in health applications. Shortly after the Curies' discovery, British physicist J.J. Thompson detected the presence of radiation in well water. This led to the subsequent discovery that many of the world's famous health springs were slightly radioactive. Well and spring water is radioactive due to the presence of radon, an odorless invisible gas. Some scientists and doctors at the time posited the springs' famous curative properties came from radiation. To many minds at the time, if water containing radon was good for health, water containing more powerful radioactive elements would be even better. This theory created the framework for a wave of radioactive health products, including the ones that killed Bailey and Byers.
Ebeneezer “Eben” MacBurney Byers was a wealthy socialite considered to be the personification of the Roaring '20's. The son of steel magnate Alexander Byers, he graduated from Yale and sat on the boards of the AM Byers Steel Company and Westinghouse Electric. A gifted athlete, he won the US Amateur Golf Championship in 1906. He was a horse racing enthusiast who owned stables in the United States and Great Britain. His life was charmed until he fell from a railway sleeping berth after attending the annual Yale-Harvard football game. He complained of arm pain and lethargy for weeks after the fall. Eventually he consulted Dr. C.C. Moyar of Pittsburgh, who prescribed him Radithor.
Radithor was triple-distilled water containing at least 1 microcurie each of the radioactive isotopes Ra-226 and Ra-228. It was manufactured by Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey. Radithor hit the market as part of a wave of radioactive health products like Degnen's Radio-Active Eye Applicator, Dormand Radioactive Toothpaste, and the Gra-Maze Uranium Comforter. Radithor was manufactured by serial entrepreneur William J.A. Bailey. Bailey had hustled his way out of poverty through a sting of businesses with varying degrees of fraudulence. Before manufacturing Radithor, Bailey had been sentenced to prison after taking deposits for automobiles produced by his non-existent firm, the Carnegie Engineering Corporation. In the 1910's, he got into the patent medicine racket. He was fined for fraud in 1918 over false claims about a purported cure for impotence called “Las-I-Co for Superb Manhood,” which contained strychnine.
Bailey began to manufacture and sell radium-based medicine in the 1920's. He was possibly inspired by Marie Curie's 1921 visit to the US to take delivery of one gram of radium purchased through a stateside fundraising effort. At the time, a gram of radium was worth $100,000. Bailey founded a company called Associated Radium Chemists in 1922. His signature products were Arium Radium Tablets and Radithor. His marketing strategy emphasized the radioactive content of his products. He challenged anyone to prove that Radithor contained less than one microgram of radium as advertised. Unfortunately for his customers, this was one claim made by Bailey that proved to be true. Bailey referred to himself as “Dr. Wiliam Bailey” in ads and business filings, despite having dropped out of Harvard after three semesters. In 1927, Bailey pleaded guilty to charges of practicing medicine without a license.
By the time Bailey got into radioactive medicine, radium was racking up a body count. Stories began to appear about the Radium Girls, employees of the US Radium Corporation who painted watches with radium-based luminescent paint for the US military. The women were instructed to lick the end of their paint brushes to maintain a point for painting watch hands and numbers to save their employer time and materials. The press began featuring stories of these women, who were dying from radium exposure.
Eben Byers took his first sip of Radithor the same year Bailey pleaded guilty to practicing unlicensed medicine. Whether it was due to placebo effect or the radioactive content of the tonic, Byers became a true believer. He claimed Radithor instantly eliminated his pain and gave him more energy. He had cases of the stuff delivered to his various residences. He recommended it to his friends, and even gave it to his race horses. Byer's sometimes girlfriend Mary S. Hill began to take Radithor regularly upon his recommendation. Byers himself consumed as many as three bottles a day.
The question as to why Dr. Moyar, a licensed physician, prescribed a wealthy client a product made by a man with a dubious history of business ethics and a non-existent one as a physician can be answered by Bailey's generous kickback program, which gave doctors 17 percent of the profits from every bottle of Radithor they prescribed their patients. Bailey could afford it because he was getting rich. He made a 400 percent profit on every bottle sold. This allowed him to create an economic incentive for doctors to ignore his fabricated medical credentials and fraud convictions.
After three years of enthusiastically consuming Radithor, Eben Byers began to feel unwell. He no longer felt the rush of euphoria he experienced when he first downed the radioactive water. He began to get headaches. His teeth began to fall out. Then his jaw began to disintegrate. Mary S. Hill, the woman he'd turned on to Radithor, became ill and died. Byers consulted Dr. Joseph Manning Steiner, the Manhattan x-ray specialist who examined several of the Radium Girls. Steiner immediately recognized Byers' symptoms as radium poisoning.
When radium is consumed, it attaches to skeletal structures. Once embedded, the radioactive material begins to eat away at bone. One gram of radium can create as many as 32,000,000 perforations in human bone. The only way to eliminate ingested radium is to remove large quantities of bone calcium. After Steiner's diagnosis, Byers had portions of his jaws surgically removed.
Byers prominence as a wealthy socialite and the grotesqueness of his condition prompted the Federal Trade Commission to convene hearings of the sale of Radithor. William Bailey vigorously defended himself and his product to the Commission. He argued concurrently that Radithor caused no ill health effects and even if it did, his company could not be held responsible because it was prescribed by a licensed physician.
Byers health had deteriorated to the point he was unable to testify before the FTC in person. He sent them a letter of apology stained with his own blood. By the time the hearings commenced, what was left of his mouth bled uncontrollably. The commission sent attorney Robert Hiner Winn to interview Byers at his palatial Long Island residence. As Winn told Time Magazine:
“A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine. 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.”
Eben Byers died on March 31, 1932. Both Bailey and Moyar vehemently denied that Radithor contributed to his death. “I never had a death among my patients from radium treatment,” Moyar said. Ever the showman, Bailey stated, “I have drunk more radium water than any man alive, and I never have suffered any ill effects.” An autopsy was conducted on Byers' body revealing that it contained 36 micrograms of radium, even though he ceased consuming Radithor for over a year before his death. Ten micrograms of radium is considered a lethal dose. Byers' body was interred in a lead-lined coffin in his family mausoleum. It was briefly exhumed in 1965 and found to still be dangerously radioactive.
The FTC did not find Bailey or Moyar responsible for Byers' death, but they did order Bailey to stop making claims about any purported health benefits of Radithor. Doctors stopped prescribing the tonic, and Bailey eventually closed his business, although he insisted the reason was the Great Depression and not the death of Eben Byers. Bailey weathered the 1930's thanks to the wealth he accumulated from selling Radithor. His fortunes rebounded during World War II when he became the manager of the electronic division of the International Business Machines Corporation, better known today by its acronym, IBM. William Bailey died of bladder cancer in 1949. His body was also exhumed in the 1960's and found to have been ravaged by radiation. Like Byers, Bailey's remains continued to be highly radioactive decades after his death.
Even though the details of Eben Byers’ death have been forgotten by many, everyone should remember the lessons of the fiasco. Hundreds of products billed as being beneficial to people's health have been removed from the market once their adverse effects came to light. Products like Olestra, Vioxx, and Propoxyphene are just a few examples of substances that entered the market with a bang but were unceremoniously yanked after they were discovered to be unhealthy. The cycle continues to this day.
The radium saga went from national news to historical trivia in the decades since Byers and Bailey died. This is partly due to World War II and the fact that a true atomic age emerged thereafter. The gruesome horrors of radium poisoning pale in comparison to the ravages of atomic warfare and nuclear fallout. After radium medicine was quietly removed from the market, the splitting of the atom created a new existential fear that threatened every man, woman, and child with inescapable annihilation. The era of radioactive quackery became forgotten history- a brief instance of a poorly-understood scientific discovery exploited for profit in the name of health, with disastrous results.
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Good article! Concern about the highly questionable medical overuses/abuses of radiation, like routine dental X-rays and radiation for treating most cancers, seems not to have dulled its use, even on cancers like glioblastoma for which it has, at best, de minimis value. Federal and local governments incite terror in homeowners about radon while blithely giving a regulatory pass to radiation in medicine.
Great article