Radium: The Deadly Health Fad of the Early 1900s

In 1903, after Pierre and Marie Curie and fellow scientist Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in physics for their discoveries involving radioactive substances, the world seemed on the verge of a miraculous new era in medicine.

But when an enterprising newspaper reporter asked Marie Curie about the potential use of radium to cure or prevent disease, she refused to speculate. “Why, I do not know,” she answered. “How can I tell? I am not aware that anything in that direction has been actually demonstrated!”

If Marie Curie was hesitant to get ahead of the science, many others weren’t. By 1904, the makers of quack remedies and bogus medical devices were touting the radioactive element radium, which the Curies had discovered in 1898, as a cure for just about everything.

One widely advertised potion called EC-ZINE, billed as “the wonderful new radium cure but recently revealed by science,” claimed to “positively and permanently cure” a list of ailments that included eczema, pimples, ringworm and “blood poison.” The company promised a $50 reward to any purchaser whose eczema somehow remained uncured.

In Buffalo, an advertiser offered “radium-charged water,” calling it the “greatest discovery of the 20th century” and asserting that it “cures all diseases.” Readers were invited to come by for a free drink.

Meanwhile, newspaper ads in the Upper Midwest promoted the “new radium light cure,” capable of curing “every kind of human ill” with results so “great and wonderful” that it was “hard, indeed, to find the dividing line between human accomplishment and miracle.”

Many of these supposed remedies were touted by doctors—or purported doctors. One, for example, advertised himself as Rupert Wells, M.D., “Professor of Therapeutics in the Post-Graduate College of Electro-Medical Therapeutics, St. Louis, Mo.” Wells claimed he had “an absolutely certain cure” for cancer, consumption and “thousands of lesser diseases … almost in a night.” With possibly unintentional humor, he insisted that “My heart glows with pride and gratitude as I think of it.”

Wells’ ads urged readers to send for a free book, Radium in the Cure of Disease, which touted the benefits of his elixir Radol, complete with “testimonials from people who have been cured by its use.”

Radol and its creator, Wells, whose real name was apparently Dennis Dupuis, figured prominently in one of a series of exposés in Collier’s magazine by investigative journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, later collected in his book The Great American Fraud. Adams called Dupuis “the fake professor of a mythical chair in a purely imaginary college, whose ‘remedy,’ ‘Radol,’ contained exactly as much radium as dishwater does.”

In fact, it’s unlikely any of these products contained any actual radium. Because of the laborious process required to mine and refine radium, it was incredibly expensive—reportedly selling in early 1904 for $8.4 million a pound, compared with about $300 for a pound of gold.

Unfortunately, a few radioactive remedies did contain some measure of radium. The most notorious example may have been Radithor, a concoction of radium-laced distilled water sold in half-ounce bottles at $1 a pop (close to $19 now).

The man behind Radithor was a mail-order promoter and convicted fraudster named William J.A. Bailey, who referred to himself as “Dr. Bailey”—despite his lack of a medical degree. Bailey offered an array of products that claimed to use radiation to cure all manner of ills, including Thorone Tablets that purported to be “250 times more radioactive than radium” and the Radiendocrinator, a small metal box that initially sold for $1,000 at a time when you could buy a new 1924 Model T Ford for under $300.

Bailey’s pitch for the pricey device was that it could somehow revitalize the body’s endocrine glands, curing “everything from acidosis to diabetes, from pimples to poor memory,” the pioneering consumer advocates Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink wrote in their 1932 book 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics.

The Radiendocrinator seems to have been of particular interest to men worried about their waning sexual powers. They were instructed to wear the device to bed at night, positioned with a special “athletic strap.”

But, as Kallet and Schlink write, Bailey’s “supreme masterpiece” was Radithor.

“While it was directed chiefly to wealthy but jaded individuals seeking a remedy for sexual impotence or venereal disease, it also made claims of curative worth in 160 other afflictions,” Ruth deForest Lamb wrote of Radithor in her 1936 book American Chamber of Horrors: The Truth About Food and Drugs. “The minimum course of treatment was three to five months—a half-ounce bottle to be taken every day ‘in the average condition,’ but two or three in severe or chronic cases.”

Because of its cost and the number of bottles required to effect a “cure,” Radithor was out of reach for many consumers of modest means—and lucky for them.

Not so lucky was Eben Byers, a Pittsburgh millionaire who’d made a national name for himself as the U.S. amateur golf champion in 1906. Byers could afford as much Radithor as he wanted, and starting in late 1927 he managed to gulp down multiple bottles each day for more than three years—probably some 1,000 to 1,500 bottles in all, according to Roger M. Macklis, writing in Scientific American magazine. He even gave it to some of his racehorses, Macklis reports.

By the time Byers realized that Radithor was doing him more harm than good, it was too late. He died of radium poisoning in early 1932, at age 51, but not before his almost unimaginable suffering had drawn national attention—and calls to ban the “cure” that killed him.

Time magazine quoted a government attorney who had visited him months before his death: “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.” An autopsy later revealed that his bones contained more than three times the amount of radium considered fatal.

Because of a loophole in the law (none of Bailey’s outrageous claims actually appeared on the product’s packaging), the Food and Drug Administration couldn’t halt the sale of Radithor. But the Federal Trade Commission was eventually able to curtail its advertising. By then, however, Bailey had cashed out and moved on to new ventures, including the Bioray, said to irradiate entire rooms of the home, and the Adrenoray, a supposedly radioactive belt meant to stimulate the adrenal glands atop the kidneys.

Throughout the 1910s and well into the ’20s and ’30s, the list of radioactive health products, with or without any actual radium, grew.

An outfit called the Radior Company Ltd. of England sold a line of radioactive toiletries through American drug and department stores as early as 1918, all guaranteed to “retain their Radio activity for at least 20 years.” Offerings included face creams, powders, hair tonic and bar soap. A 1919 Radior ad explained the alleged benefits of radium: “a source of never-dying energy which vitalizes tissue, eliminates blemishes, tones up glands and muscles and brings back the rounded contours, rosy color and soft firm texture of youth.”

Kallet and Schlink noted that by 1929, consumers could buy everything from mouthwashes to chocolate bars, all supposedly delivering the miraculous benefits of radiation.

Many manufacturers around the world added the word radium to their brands simply to give them an added glow—in products from beer to butter to cigars—even if they rarely contained any actual radium. Shoppers in what is now the Czech Republic could buy radium bread, which apparently contained at least a trace of it from the local water.

Marie Curie’s own death at 66 from aplastic anemia was generally attributed to radiation exposure. But her work also led to legitimate, often lifesaving medical treatments, some of which remain standard today. “Radium isotopes are still used in certain stages of treatment for prostate cancer, and, more broadly, radiation therapy is often a mainstay in cancer treatment,” notes Dr. Lydia Kang, co-author with Nate Pedersen of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (2017). She underscores, however, that radiation remains dangerous to patient and provider alike if not properly handled.

Even physicians with the best intentions in the early 1900s were taking a leap of faith in using radium to treat their patients. “Now that we’re in 2025, we’ve had a lot of time to figure this out,” Kang says. “Back then it was, let’s try this and see what happens.”