Radium infused products were a common quack medicine in the early 1900’s. A notorious one was Radithor, from 1918 to the 1930’s.
There were cosmetics, toothpastes, soaps! All your favorite home products. Even a radium infused jockstrap.
Famous ad campaigns,
The craze came to an end when then-famous industrialist Eben Byers developed cancer of the jaw and died after using Radithor for several years, causing bioaccumulation of radium in his bones. Most of his teeth had come out, most of his jaw had to be removed, and other bones in his body were disintegrating.
There was also the famous case of the Radium Dial Painters in the US and Canada, who suffered similar fates after being told to use their mouths to shape camel hair brushes used to paint radium dials. 50 became sick, a dozen died from radiation poisoning.
Undark radium paint,
Your beauty and health will be literally radiating from you!
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I think we’re paying for lead to this day! It causes intellectual impairment and all kinds of other lasting nastiness. At least we’ve taken big steps to remove it from our lived environment, so the effects are less today than in the 70s, and it should continue to get better in the future.
We still have a TON of pseudoscience “medicine” around today of course. Homeopathy, using magnets to “cure” things magnets cannot possible cure, “crystal healing”, techno-babble quackery like “quantum healing”, etc. But most of it at least is on the “useless but harmless” end of the scale, not the “makes your jaw fall off” end! Although, if it stops people from getting legit health care and treating their cancer with sham cures rather than evidence based medicine, that is a type of harm too.
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For sure, the damage over time is an interesting subject. Like lead has a direct exposure effect (IQ loss) but I’m not sure if that passes down to subsequent generations. Maybe though… in epigenetics, there are multi generation effects. Even it doesn’t, there might still be indirect impacts. Like your society makes worse choices for itself on average, and the effects of those choices go on to cause multi generational damage in other ways.
It must’ve been studied a lot by now, but I don’t know much about it.
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I seem to remember that people with arthritis and other kinds of chronic pain are going into old mines where radon accumulates and “hang out” for pain treatment. Doctors recommendations. But hey, homeopathy and all that. So that doesn’t carry any value sadly.
Let’s hope there is some real science behind that idea.
It would be cool to have one of those bottles as a conversation piece
Would be interesting to find out what happened to each of those “prominent musicians” in the OP thumbnail.
Yeah. Before I made the post I’d actually attempted to look a few up on Wikipedia, but came up empty handed. I didn’t try very hard though! There might be better places around the web for old timey Seattle musicians.
Thanks for trying and for the post too.
Tried to upload photos of the radium girls, but the instance wouldn’t let me.
Here’s the wikipedia photo of them anyway. 1922.
I was thinking one with more tumors.
Oh, I see. I wonder if that could’ve been blocked by some filters? When I made the OP I ran across a photo of Eben Byers after his jaw issue, and it was rather… gruesome. I decided against putting it in the post, even with a NSFW marker, but I’m not sure what would have happened if I tried.
Soon to be FDA approved.
