What happens if you drink radium for three years (7 photos)

There was a time (early 1900) when people were holy We are confident that radioactive therapy works wonders. Radium was stuffed into everything they could, and customers happily swept it off the shelves.





After physicist D. Thompson investigated in 1903 wells, whose water was considered healing for centuries, interest in radium increased. Thompson found out that water owes its miraculous power to inert radioactive gas - radon.

Scientists have come to the conclusion that it is radiation that gives people strength and it also promotes accelerated metabolism and cellular activity. The problem was that radium, upon contact with air, quickly was falling apart, but a quick solution was found for this problem.



In 1912, the "Revigator" device was registered - now Anyone could charge their water with radium. Advertising sheets read: “An eternal source of health in your home!” And now, in the morning you can it was not a cup of coffee to drink, but life-giving water, so that life would be bright, joyful and senile madness has been delayed.

It was precisely from this “Revigator” that the hero of our story named Eben Byers suffered.



Eben was born on April 12, 1880 in a wealthy and aristocratic family. He studied at Yale University and then took a position on the board of directors in his father’s company. Like many in at that time and in that position, in his free time Byers was engaged in horseback riding riding and playing golf. By all indications, a completely prosperous life awaited him. life is the envy of others. But everything went differently in 1927.

When he was returning from a football match on the train, he fell from beds and broke his arm. The fracture healed, but the pain continued bother a man. The doctor, in response to Eben's complaints, advised him to undergo the very course of treatment with radioactive water "Raditor", sold in every pharmacy.



"Raditor" was created by William D. A. Bailey, a Harvard underachiever, who was expelled from the university, but considered himself a doctor. Healing water was not his first medicine, but all the others had no benefits. Yes, and harm too.



But “Raditor” (distilled water infused with radium isotope) killed a lot of people.

Byers took his first dose and felt dramatically improved. He gradually increased the dosage and reached three bottles "Raditor" per day.

In 1930, Eben realized that the drug, perhaps, did not heal, but, on the contrary, destroyed the body - it was already too late.



The man’s bones were completely covered in cancer, his jaws were destroyed. Byers had to undergo two operations - he lost the entire upper jaw (except for the two front teeth) and most of the lower jaw. Byers had an abscess in his brain and two holes in his skull.

It later became clear that the man took three lethal doses radium. Eben died in terrible agony on March 31, 1932, at the age of 51 years old. His body was buried in a lead coffin.



The whole story of Eben Byers was very instructive for Americans. Newspapers sadly and ironically wrote that “radium water is excellent worked until his jaw dropped." All sales of "Raditor" and all other radiocontaining drugs stopped instantly, and radium was considered very dangerous.

Bailey's company was also closed, but the enterprising businessman did not I lost my nerve and founded another company. He started doing radioactive paperweights and belt clips.