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Radium girls glowing in coffin4/18/2023 ![]() People had long wondered what gave natural hot springs their supposed healing properties. A few years later, after a stint peddling strychnine, the active ingredient in rat poison, as an aphrodisiac under the brand name Las-I-Go For Superb Manhood, he began selling Radithor as “Pure Sunshine in a Bottle.” He claimed it would cure more than 150 different ailments.ĭrinking radioactive water to improve health may sound crazy today, but in the 1920s, when much less was known about radiation, it seemed to make sense. In 1915 he had served time in jail for mail fraud. Radithor was a product of the Bailey Radium Laboratory of East Orange, New Jersey, found by one “Dr.” William Bailey, a Harvard dropout who falsely claimed to have a medical degree from the University of Vienna. ![]() Then a physician in Pittsburgh suggested he try Radithor, a patent medicine (which consisted of little more than the element radium in a distilled water solution). He visited on doctor after another, but no one could ease his pain. The injury interfered with Byers’s golf game and his love life. It’s not clear whether the celebratory atmosphere aboard the train (or Byers’s reputation as a ladies’ man) had anything to do with it, but sometime during the trip he fell out of his upper sleeping berth and injured his arm. Yale won the game 14-0, and Byers was a Yale alumnus. In November 1927, a wealthy industrialist named Eben Byers was returning from the annual Harvard-Yale football game aboard a special chartered train.
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