Radithor and Eben Byers (1932)

Past events, not medical advice. Nothing here says what is safe today.

The product

Radithor came in half-ounce bottles of distilled water containing at least one microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228. It was made by Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey, and sold for about a dollar a bottle. The man behind it, William J. A. Bailey, held no medical or scientific degrees, according to Time, though he is reported to have styled himself “Dr.” Over 400,000 bottles were sold between 1925 and 1930. According to the Oak Ridge museum, Bailey guaranteed it was “harmless in every respect” and offered $1,000 to anyone who could show it held less radium than advertised. Nobody collected.

That was not as insane in 1927 as it sounds now. Doctors had spent years experimenting with radioactive water for arthritis and gout, and the fad was, in Time’s 1932 words, “for a short time valid.”

The patient

Eben Byers headed A. M. Byers Co., a Pittsburgh pipe maker, and the 1906 U.S. amateur golf champion. In late 1927 he fell out of a berth on a train coming back from the Harvard-Yale game and hurt his arm. A Pittsburgh practitioner, Dr. Charles Clinton Moyar, prescribed Radithor. Byers liked it so much that he sent cases to friends and even fed it to his horses.

How much he drank is unclear. A commonly repeated figure is about 1,400 bottles over roughly three years. Time, writing in 1932, said “hundreds of drinks.” One museum account says three a day for two years, which would come to about 2,000. Take the number with salt.

The jaw

By late 1930 Byers had pains in his jaw and bad headaches, and then his teeth started falling out. In September 1931 Robert Winn, a Federal Trade Commission attorney, interviewed him at his Long Island home. Winn’s report, as Time quoted it: “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.” The FTC issued a cease-and-desist order against Bailey on 19 December 1931. Bailey did not contest it.

The end

Byers died in New York on 31 March 1932. Time reported that the autopsy found he had six teeth left, an abscessed brain, and rotted jaws, and that a Columbia scientist calculated 36 micrograms of radium in his bones, where ten is considered fatal. Dr. Moyar disputed it all. He said Byers died of blood diseases that caused gout, and that he himself had taken as much Radithor and felt fine.

Byers is reported to have been buried in a lead-lined coffin. His remains were exhumed in 1965 for study and were still measurably radioactive.

After

The scandal was huge. National newspapers covered it heavily, and Time reported that New York’s mayor Jimmy Walker, who used a radium-water device, said he would not stop. Bailey said he sold only on doctors’ prescriptions. The craze for radium tonics collapsed, and Byers’s death is often credited with pushing regulators toward tougher oversight of patent medicines.

This is history, not medical advice. Do not drink radium.

On the record

• Radithor contained radium-226 and radium-228 and sold for about a dollar a bottle. Over 400,000 were sold between 1925 and 1930.
• Byers started drinking it in late 1927 and stopped when his health failed in 1930.
• The FTC ordered Bailey to stop on 19 December 1931.
• Byers died on 31 March 1932.

Missing from the record

• How many bottles Byers drank. Estimates range from “hundreds” to about 1,400 to more.
• Why he really kept drinking it. One museum account mentions a persistent rumor about his love life. We can’t confirm it.
• Whether anyone else died of Radithor. Time reported that a friend of Byers died of the same cause in 1931, but we could not confirm that independently.
• How much the case itself changed the law. “Often credited” is the careful way to put it.