The Rise, Fall And Rise Again Of Radioactive Medication

Whilst unlikely to be found in any home pharmacy, radiation therapy is an important and essential part of modern medicine, but shortly after its discovery, this was far from the case.

Better known today as radiotherapy, it is considered to be one of the three primary treatments for cancer, alongside surgery and chemotherapy, undertaken with the strictest of care under the supervision of a specialist.

However, a few years after Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for discovering radium amongst many other breakthroughs in the field of radioactivity (including coining the name), there was an excitement around radiation without the caution that should have immediately arisen.

An entire field of radiation-based “cures” emerged, from natural radon spas, the “revigorator” pot that irradiated water, radioactive toothpaste and a “clean tobacco card” that claimed to make cigarettes less dangerous in a manner akin to how a landmine makes grenade juggling less dangerous.

The most infamous of these was Radithor, a solution that mixed water with radium salts that were advertised as a cure for essentially everything, from impotence to the common cold, sold by William Bailey, a university dropout turned fake doctor starting in 1918.

The problem would quickly become apparent as around this time was the case of the Radium Girls, five industrial workers who painted watch dials that contracted radiation poisoning and highlighted how devastating and destructive radioactivity was.

Radithor would face a very similar case in with the young American socialite Eben Byers, who turned from a healthy and athletic man into a man who, in the words of the New York Times, lost his jaw and found that his body was disintegrating due to the effects of multiple cancers.

He ultimately died in 1932, which after protracted legal proceedings led to radiation-based medicines being taken off the market entirely. Mr Bailey himself would later die of bladder cancer in 1949.

Ultimately, radiotherapy’s uses would be discovered in the 1950s, and much more targeted and supervised medical interventions would ensure that radiation would help to cure cancer rather than cause it.