“Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak,” attorney Robert Hiner Winn wrote for Time Magazine about his visit with Eben Byers in 1930. Winn was investigating a popular radium-infused medicine called Radithor for the Federal Trade Commission when he noted Byers’ condition. “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.”

Byers had been consuming Radithor in large quantities for several years, believing it was improving his health. By the time he realized it actually killing him, it was already too late.

Radioactive Water

In the early 1900s, the radioactive element Radium was believed to have highly curative properties. Radium emanation therapy was believed to enhance the vital processes, as Dr. W. Engelmann noted in 1913.

Radioactivity could seemingly do it all – stop chronic diarrhea, prevent insanity, delay old age and create a “splendid youthful joyous life,” as Dr. C.G. Davis wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Medicine.

J.J. Thompson, the man who discovered the electron, wrote about the presence of radioactivity in well water in 1903. This lead to the discovery that many of the world’s most famous health springs were radioactive due to “radium emanation” – radon gas – in the ground where the water flowed.

It was quickly accepted by the scientific community of the time that the radioactivity must be the reason for the curative properties of the springs.

Professor Bertram Boltwood of Yale wrote that radiation carried carried electrical energy deep into the body where it stimulated cell activity, “arousing all secretory and excretory organs.”