Radithor

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Radithor was a patent nostrum made from distilled water, radium, and mesthorium (an isotope of radium).  Radithor was manufactured from 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, Inc.  The owner of the lab was William Bailey, a Harvard dropout.  Radithor was advertised as a Cure For The Living Dead, Perpetual Sunshine, and a cure for impotence.  It is best remembered today for what it did to Eben Byers, businessman and amateur golf champion.


Eben was president of the Girard Iron Company and was at the prime of life when he twisted his shoulder, and, on the advice of a doctor started taking Radithor, some 1400 doses.  Bailey paid doctors to recommend his tonic, he wasn't a doctor but said that he was. 
The damage done to Byers is beyond belief-
 

 The result of three years of drinking Radithor.  Byers died not from radiation poisoning but multiple cancers.  I would have made the psychopath Bailey drink 4 bottles a day of his poison. 

“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.”
 

 Radium induced chin cancer.
 
 
Byers was buried in a lead lined coffin.  Bailey continued to make radium products even after the Federal Trade Commission shut him down. 
 

 Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!

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