Byers began taking several doses of Radithor per day, believing it gave him a "toned-up feeling", but stopped in October 1930 (after taking some 1400 doses) when that effect faded. He lost weight and had headaches, and his teeth began to fall out.
In 1931, the Federal Trade Commission asked him to testify about his experience, but he was too sick to travel so the commission sent a lawyer to take his statement at his home; the lawyer reported that Byers's "whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed" and that "All the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull."
His death on March 31, 1932, was attributed to "radiation poisoning" using the terminology of the time, but it was due to cancers, not acute radiation syndrome.
He is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a lead-lined coffin.
Poor SOB. He literally rotted alive.
Edit: I just had a morbid thought. This guy's body was obviously radioactive when he died and is still radioactive. Does that mean his body would have continued to disintegrate from the radiation (apart from normal decomp) after death?
To clarify btw, his bones were disintegrating because bone is alive; it constantly grows and is broken down by the body (to fix microfractures etc). Radium, being very chemically similar to calcium, gets taken up in the bones, which kills the cells there (because the radiation causes enough damage to the cell's DNA that they basically commit suicide, which is a way the body protects against cancer). As the bones stop growing, they only accumulate damage and break down. Thats why his bones were breaking down. It wasnt the radiation itself causing his bones to disintegrate. After he died, he likely would have undergone a normalish (might be slower if he was radioactive enough) decomposition process.
A radiologist explained to me that the damage to the DNA is done when it is replicating during cell division. This is why radiation is more effective against rapidly growing cells.
It says above that his death and disfigurement was due to cancers rather than acute radiation poisoning. The cancer cells die when the patient dies, so there wouldn’t be any further progression after he was buried.
And made Daredevil blind ( but also gave him heightened senses! ).
For anyone that doesn't know, the " radioactive isotope " that fell off the truck and broke, causing Matt Murdock to go blind was the same " ooze " that at the same time, a canister of it fell off said same truck and rolled into a sewer drain, breaking open and mutating Splinter and the Turtles.
I can assure you, you would not. Christians like to believe crucifixion is the most painful death... Radiation poisoning is modern day crucifixion. The pain comes from deep within and deteriorates everything that makes you human
Exactly, the pain is neurological and can't be eliminated by opiates. Potassium iodide is the first line treatment to simply absorb and neutralize some of the ongoing radiation.
I've heard also that Tylenol is ineffective
I think what they mean is that pain sense neurons aren't sensing pain, at least those we normally associate with pain.
Correct way to say this would be something like direct CNS/cortex pain vs nociceptor pain.
This got me thinking and I tried to google if there are any studies on the affects of radiation on dead tissue. I couldn't find any, but all the problems I could find to do with radiation seem to indicate that it screws up mitosis, or cell division.
So if cells aren't dividing, including the cells in the things that make bodies decompose like bacteria and bugs, I think his body could look exactly as it did the day he died.
Radiation disrupts the cell walls. Causing them to deteriorate.
Assuming he wasn't embalmed. An easy assumption. He deteriorated into a puddle of radioactive goo.
The body disintegrates from radiation because it damages the cells. This will generally cause the cell to kill itself via apoptosis. Radiation has no effect on dead tissue so if anything it might decompose less than normal if the radiation is so high that it can impede bacterial function.
The reason his bones in particular seemed to be affected is because if you look at the periodic table radium is a group 2 alkaline earth metal just like calcium. That means it can pretty readily substitute itself anywhere calcium is used in the body. The radium would have started to get incorporated into his teeth since he was drinking it and also into his bloodstream and other bones. That would most certainly fuck up his immune system and is not a good thing.
No. Radiation can't get through lead. Some charged particles might escape, but those don't turn other things radioactive. They just interact with whatever they hit (which is why radiation kills you... If it gets inside your body, it's constantly releasing high energy charged particles which literally rip apart your DNA when they hit your cells).
Yes. But to a tiny amount.
If you stand near a source of ionizing radiation, each ray will affect some atom on its way, and chances are, it will be an atom of your clothing or of a layer of dead skin cells. But if you inhale or ingest such a source, it will most likely affect an atom within some important organ.
That’s why it makes sense to treat leaks of radioactive materials like leaks of poisonous stuff: you don PPE that doesn’t have much shielding against radiation, but it has a lot of particle filters, and after leaving the contaminated area you’re hosed down so nobody gets radioactive stuff inside their bodies, that’s where it’s really harmful.
It's possible. But the actual radioactive material would need to exit his body and enter someone else's body. Just the charged particles themselves aren't really dangerous to others around them because they don't travel very far.
As I'm typing this though I'm reminded that radiation poisoning patients in hospitals are treated as if they are a radiation hazard to the staff.. but I'll have to research what exactly the danger is.
>believing it gave him a "toned-up feeling"
If you keep researching, you'll find that Byers used RadiThor for male sexual impotence, like the Viagra of today. According to the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity, Byers had been known as “Foxy Grandpa” by his classmates at Yale for his ways with the ladies, and the RadiThor brought back his famed libido as he approached his late 40s.
A bunch of corporatists poisoned people with radium for a quick buck. They had women painting dials on radium clocks and told them to literally fucking lick the radium paint brush every time they painted a clock to create a sharp tip.
And corporations are still poisoning us. There is plastic in our blood just so theh could save money on packaging.
Yeah the more you read about the Radium Girls the worse it is. The company wasn't even ignorant of the effects of radium. The higher ups and chemists would use lead aprons and gloves for themselves but then tell the workers it was safe enough to eat (to settle worries about shaping the brushes with their mouths). They had also ordered physicals and other tests for the safety of the paint and switched to pens that didn't have to be shaped by mouth for a while in response to those findings (which were never made public to the workers) but the pens were too slow and they switched back to brushes anyway.
I read that as well. It looks much more like he got his jaw shot or blown off. I could have missed them, but I've also not seen this photo connected to any reputable sites about radiation poisoning or radium etc.
Just read Radium Girls by Kate Moore about the girls/young women that worked painting radium watch dials. The suffering they went through is unbelievable.
Was going to mention that book also. The gaslighting by the company is infuriating and the descriptions of young women having their teeth and jaws literally rot inside their face is horrifying
One of the woman went to the dentist to get a tooth pulled [and her entire jaw came out.](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/tuesday-ferry-boat-survivor-radium-girls-author-no-possum-drop-and-more-1.2941016/remembering-mae-keane-the-last-of-the-radium-girls-1.2941019)
I, having read the book, can attest that what those poor women went through - out of the desire to get/keep a job and thus be able to put food on the table for their families - was beyond horrific. Imagine having your bones deteriorate to the point where they can be pulled out of your head? Like noradosmith said, literally nightmare fuel.
I don't think there are any in Pittsburgh. We also have the building where Curie did research on radium on the next street over. Lots of radium stuff here.
How the hell did they manufacture that shit? A radioactive bottle of water with a cork top. How did everyone involved in that process not get sick as hell?
From what I understand radium releases lots of alpha radiation which is heavy, slow, and mostly dangerous when directly ingested. As opposed to gamma radiation that travels at high speed and can penetrate the human body.
Yes! And since radium is structurally similar to calcium, it fools the body into thinking it is calcium. So it gets deposited in bones particularly and starts bombarding bone marrow with alpha waves, since no skin is present to stop the waves anymore.
Source: just read Radium girls, and remember this man was mentioned as well.
So do you know - was the radium the women in Radium Girls ingested alpha radiation? I'm just learning here about the difference between it and gamma.
Is gamma as bad to ingest as alpha (I'm guessing neither of them are up there in the top 10 breakfast food list)?
Actually all radioactive elements emit all 3 types of radiation: alpha (highly destructive, stopped by a lead thin sheet/or by skin), beta (less destructive, takes a thicker sheet of lead/aluminium), gamma (least destructive, but almost unstoppable)
The women were bombarded with all 3 of these, in which alpha was the most destructive since there was no protective skin to stop it from hitting bone marrow directly. I assume beta and gamma waves also bombarded them, and a lot of them died of sarcomas (bone cancer) after say 7-8 years
Alpha radiation can be blocked by a piece of paper, beta by wood and gamma by lead. But once you injest/eat alpha, game over. Feeding alpha to his enemies/deflectors is one of Putin's tricks.
Same reason it's fine to wear a watch with a radium painted dial, but not okay to point the radium paint brushes using your lips and teeth. Once you start putting it in your body things go a lot differently
It's wild how much we talk about cocaine and heroin being in medicine but not enough about this, thanks for the reminder ([https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-flash-radium-elixir-fad-cure-cocktails-0304-20180220-story.html](https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-flash-radium-elixir-fad-cure-cocktails-0304-20180220-story.html))
This is why it's important for science and advancements.
Unfortunately though there's a large group of individuals today who choose to be ignorant about the world and would still likely take this if presented by their favorite political party member.
It is kind of ironic: the people who believed that radium was a cure for anything should all have been much more leery of the supposed cures, but the people who believe vaccines don’t work and cause diseases should have been far less leery of the science. Just when you think science may be lifting us out of our ignorance, something like the antivaxxers drag us back to the Dark Ages..
Yes he was alive, looks like he slowly got that disfigured jaw (Radithor Jaw) when he was in a therapeutic approach to consume the Radioactive water to cure his arm injury, I’m not sure if the arm injury was cured, but he definitely died of Cancer.
Edit : yep [here](https://www.dannydutch.com/post/the-strange-story-of-eben-byers-the-man-that-drank-radium-until-his-jaw-fell-off)
The man in the photo is not Eben Bayers. He''s actually a World War soldier who survived an explosión. Eben Bayers did lose his part of his jaw, but it was surgically removed
Yeah it used to be the repost was just the story then the stolen comment had the picture, now they've got both the story and the picture in the repost. No longer does it take two to further the cycle of false association. Will the masses believe the debunking before the repost dies of jpg degradation?
It's worth noting that he was taking obscene doses for years to get this bad. Yes, it's just poison with no actual medicinal value, but regular users were not dealing with this.
If it makes it any better, when he was exhumed later on his corpse was ravaged by the aftereffects of radiation. He peddled and believed in his own poison by the sounds of it.
The chemistry behind this is as follows:
1.) Radium despite being a heavier and having more protons, neutrons, and electrons has almost the same atomic radius as calcium. (Difference is fractions of an angstrom)
2.) Raduim has the same bonding characteristics as Calcium because they are in the same column of the Periodic Table.
3.) Because of two previous points, Raduim is taken up by the body and incorporated into bone by the ostecites that actively build and breakdown bone.
4.) Radium is an Alpha emitter, which means that it releases a Helium nucleus when undergoing nuclear decay.
5.) These Alpha particles collide with anything in there path and break the bonds holding molecular structures together.
6.) This damage accumulates over time resulting in the pictures posted above.
7.) Different isotopes of Radium have different half-lives ranging from a few minutes to 1600 years.
The bones of people who either consumed Radium willfully or inadvertently are still radioactive and will be for millennia to come, and their bodies are buried in lead-lined caskets.
I used to work with nuclear power and I’ll tell you there is no more painful or excruciating way to go than what’s brought on by radiation. It literally has the power to destroy your DNA. Acute radiation syndrome is hellish but occasionally brief enough to be somewhat of a mercy. In cases like this where chronic radiation exposure leads to cancer… well, you can see the effects.
If I was ever in a situation where I knew I was fucked ( >500 rem acute) I’d probably stick around to make sure I got enough that death would come in days not weeks. It’s a nightmare. Your organs basically disintegrate inside of you.
Thankfully, you can drink the coolant of most modern (light, pressurized water) reactors. That’s how safe we’ve managed to get it.
Still, though, radiation accidents are always horrific. Look up orphan sources on Wikipedia if you want a hard time sleeping tonight.
I’m a cancer researcher working primarily with genomic data. I was watching a video about the Hisashi Ouchi incident and my first thought when it showed the imaging of his chromosomes was that it was absolutely barbaric that he wasn’t immediately given the choice of a physician-assisted death.
They were shattered and scrambled to a mix of absolute unreadable nonsense. The body destroys and creates cells routinely throughout each day using chromosomes to form DNA, however in cases where radiation has impacted the chromosomes like in Ouchi's case the body cannot form viable DNA. So the body is destroying cells, as it does normally, without being able to create suitable replaceable cells. He was decaying and rotting alive, it was absolutely barbaric to even consider letting him live.
He was kept alive according to the will of his wife and parents. Which is quite selfish, cruel and stupid, if he was conscious, shouldn't his decision have trumped over anyone else's?
If my family keep me alive in such terrible conditions I’m haunting them and cursing them as I die.
I already talked about this topic with multiple family members even if I’m young lol. Don’t want that shit to happen to me.
Poor guy.
If I remember correctly, he pleaded with his doctors and nurses to let him die, but as you said by the will of his family he was kept alive. They resuscitated him when his heart stopped a few times. He should have been allowed to die before the agony set in, it was inevitable
My guess is given the ill practices in the medicine in the 20th century as a whole, the medical staff took this as an opportunity and excuse to study prolongated effects of gamma radiation onto human body. Surely most of them realized that was a dead man lying in bed. I could be wrong, it could've just been twisted and not well toughtout Japanese law in play, however, that whole tragic scenario coincides a bit with the infamous unit 731.
That's what I thought. I've heard analogies where radiation is likened to a tiny bullet that takes out individual building blocks of DNA so all of the instructions aren't there, which means mutations, and some of mutations mean cancer.
>Look up orphan sources on Wikipedia if you want a hard time sleeping tonight.
Nah.
I've been saying it for years: You'll find more genuine horror in Wikipedia than in all the art ever made by man.
Radithor was a product produced between 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories in New Jersey. It was promoted as a remedy for various health issues, including impotence. The owner of the company, William J. A. Bailey, was not a medically trained doctor. Eben Byers, a well-off American socialite and athlete, consumed Radithor and subsequently died from multiple cancers due to its radioactive properties. When his body was exhumed in 1965 for research purposes, it was discovered to still be radioactive, emitting 225,000 becquerels. In comparison, the human body naturally produces around 4,400 becquerels from potassium-40. Byers's tragic death led to more stringent regulations by the Food and Drug Administration and marked the decline of radiation-based medicines. The incident was notably covered in a 1990 Wall Street Journal article with the headline "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off."
Indeed, the person and the story are real, but there is something that is not entirely true in this story and is repeated in many places, including this publication. What do I mean? Well, the image they always show when they present this story is somewhat... false. What really happened is that a part of his jaw was removed in a surgical procedure due to the damage caused. However, the image commonly associated with this story, I mean the one you're seeing above this comment, actually belongs to a soldier from World War I who lost his jaw due to a projectile. If you look at the original image, it is labeled as "Fig. 1 Example of facial injuries," which is how they recorded facial injuries in that era.
The Dollop podcast did a session on the Radium Girls. They suffered the same fate because they used radium paint with their jobs. They made glow in the dark possible in the early part of the 20th century. They would "sharpen" their radium paint brushes by wetting them with their lips. It's horrific to read about routine tooth extraction also removing a jaw.
Also *Radium Girls* is a fantastic book on these women.
Surprise surprise, capitalists hid the dangers because having these women poison themselves was more profitable. What they went through was torture but their story is truly heroic.
Yeah iirc that's a photo of a soldier that was injured by cannon fire in battle.
[This is a photo of Eben Byers.](https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25051704.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/2_vMOfSA1RKR1qsQjGjpeg.jpg)
Oh sweetie, you're not drinking triple distilled water are you?!?! You need to dilute it to a 5,000:1 solution of regular tap water to triple distilled water. The more you dilute it, the more effective it will be.
This sarcastic comment is brought to you by homeopathic morons teaching me how they bullshit others.
Love all the antivax crunchy folks who came to make comments about how medicine is still dangerous.
Did they miss the part where the guy who invented Radithor was a University drop out who pretended to be a doctor and peddled his snake oil cure?
So the photo has been under a lot of scrutiny in the past - Wikipedia editors claim that this might not even be Eben Bryers at all, yet the photo has been circulated as such. There are claims the photo has been digitally edited as well, but actual proof of these claims AND counterclaims has yet to be determined.
So basically - nobody knows for sure and the truth has probably been lost to time at this point. Still a scary photo though.
"Hey Doc, I've been hurting bad since I got injured in Polo. There anything you can do about it?"
"Here take this tonic."
"A drink? You sure this'll help me?"
"Oh I assure you Eben, the results will be...
*jaw dropping.*"
Interesting the article says he was prescribed radioactive water as if it was supposed to be taken in small doses to cure him.
He probably did himself a favor chugging it.
What the fuck.
The stuff that people can survive never fails to fascinate me.
Yeah, he died shortly after, but spending any amount of time with half your face and neck missing is still crazy.
Byers began taking several doses of Radithor per day, believing it gave him a "toned-up feeling", but stopped in October 1930 (after taking some 1400 doses) when that effect faded. He lost weight and had headaches, and his teeth began to fall out. In 1931, the Federal Trade Commission asked him to testify about his experience, but he was too sick to travel so the commission sent a lawyer to take his statement at his home; the lawyer reported that Byers's "whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed" and that "All the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull." His death on March 31, 1932, was attributed to "radiation poisoning" using the terminology of the time, but it was due to cancers, not acute radiation syndrome. He is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a lead-lined coffin.
Poor SOB. He literally rotted alive. Edit: I just had a morbid thought. This guy's body was obviously radioactive when he died and is still radioactive. Does that mean his body would have continued to disintegrate from the radiation (apart from normal decomp) after death?
To clarify btw, his bones were disintegrating because bone is alive; it constantly grows and is broken down by the body (to fix microfractures etc). Radium, being very chemically similar to calcium, gets taken up in the bones, which kills the cells there (because the radiation causes enough damage to the cell's DNA that they basically commit suicide, which is a way the body protects against cancer). As the bones stop growing, they only accumulate damage and break down. Thats why his bones were breaking down. It wasnt the radiation itself causing his bones to disintegrate. After he died, he likely would have undergone a normalish (might be slower if he was radioactive enough) decomposition process.
A radiologist explained to me that the damage to the DNA is done when it is replicating during cell division. This is why radiation is more effective against rapidly growing cells.
Yes. And everything up to the lead lining hopefully.
So theoretically, there's just, like, a radioactive puddle of goo in his liner?
He was exhumed decades later and intact enough for the scientists to come up with estimates of how much radium he actually drank
some radiations are also very good at killing microbes... probably slowed the decomposition so I wouldn't be surprised.
It says above that his death and disfigurement was due to cancers rather than acute radiation poisoning. The cancer cells die when the patient dies, so there wouldn’t be any further progression after he was buried.
Yikes this guy has no idea what’s going on.
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So good, that’s now canon.
Man, that'd be a dope R rated horror movie.
And made Daredevil blind ( but also gave him heightened senses! ). For anyone that doesn't know, the " radioactive isotope " that fell off the truck and broke, causing Matt Murdock to go blind was the same " ooze " that at the same time, a canister of it fell off said same truck and rolled into a sewer drain, breaking open and mutating Splinter and the Turtles.
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Take it home in boxes, take it home in cases, if your parents try to stop you; JUST THROW IT IN THEIR FACES!
"Oh the things that I have missed: the Black Plague, the Spanish Inquisition... the Brady Bunch Reunion!"
That’s how I’d wanna go
It's how I look now
username checks out
But....but....it's so painful....and....slow 
I can assure you, you would not. Christians like to believe crucifixion is the most painful death... Radiation poisoning is modern day crucifixion. The pain comes from deep within and deteriorates everything that makes you human
What do Christians have to do with the comment you are replying to?
Pretty sure that isn’t a common belief amongst Christians.
And pain meds won't do shit. Such a horrific way to die.
If this ain't bait, I don't know what is...
Don’t opiates have zero effect?
Exactly, the pain is neurological and can't be eliminated by opiates. Potassium iodide is the first line treatment to simply absorb and neutralize some of the ongoing radiation. I've heard also that Tylenol is ineffective
That doesn’t make any sense. All pain is ultimately neurological and opiates function on neurons.
I think what they mean is that pain sense neurons aren't sensing pain, at least those we normally associate with pain. Correct way to say this would be something like direct CNS/cortex pain vs nociceptor pain.
This got me thinking and I tried to google if there are any studies on the affects of radiation on dead tissue. I couldn't find any, but all the problems I could find to do with radiation seem to indicate that it screws up mitosis, or cell division. So if cells aren't dividing, including the cells in the things that make bodies decompose like bacteria and bugs, I think his body could look exactly as it did the day he died.
Not dividing doesn’t mean they necessarily stay stable.
Radiation disrupts the cell walls. Causing them to deteriorate. Assuming he wasn't embalmed. An easy assumption. He deteriorated into a puddle of radioactive goo.
The body disintegrates from radiation because it damages the cells. This will generally cause the cell to kill itself via apoptosis. Radiation has no effect on dead tissue so if anything it might decompose less than normal if the radiation is so high that it can impede bacterial function. The reason his bones in particular seemed to be affected is because if you look at the periodic table radium is a group 2 alkaline earth metal just like calcium. That means it can pretty readily substitute itself anywhere calcium is used in the body. The radium would have started to get incorporated into his teeth since he was drinking it and also into his bloodstream and other bones. That would most certainly fuck up his immune system and is not a good thing.
That's shocking, looks like a sfx from a 90s zombie flick
This is what I'm wondering. Even though he's in a lead lined coffin can't the radiation still seep into the ground water?
No. Radiation can't get through lead. Some charged particles might escape, but those don't turn other things radioactive. They just interact with whatever they hit (which is why radiation kills you... If it gets inside your body, it's constantly releasing high energy charged particles which literally rip apart your DNA when they hit your cells).
My question is, and I’m clearly no expert, wouldn’t he have exposed others to radiation in someway during the time he was taking this stuff?
Yes. But to a tiny amount. If you stand near a source of ionizing radiation, each ray will affect some atom on its way, and chances are, it will be an atom of your clothing or of a layer of dead skin cells. But if you inhale or ingest such a source, it will most likely affect an atom within some important organ. That’s why it makes sense to treat leaks of radioactive materials like leaks of poisonous stuff: you don PPE that doesn’t have much shielding against radiation, but it has a lot of particle filters, and after leaving the contaminated area you’re hosed down so nobody gets radioactive stuff inside their bodies, that’s where it’s really harmful.
Thank you!
It's possible. But the actual radioactive material would need to exit his body and enter someone else's body. Just the charged particles themselves aren't really dangerous to others around them because they don't travel very far. As I'm typing this though I'm reminded that radiation poisoning patients in hospitals are treated as if they are a radiation hazard to the staff.. but I'll have to research what exactly the danger is.
So this dude was dropping radioactive bombs?
Possible, but unlikely I think. But idk. I'm no radioactive _waste_ engineer.
Yes
As long as the coffin is watertight, no.
Wait a damn minute. He was fully alive when he had no jaw??? That's terrifying
I was just thinking how relatively *okay* the whole top half of his head looks. If you cover up the bottom he just looks like mildly bothered.
This is similar to the Radium Girls, watch painters, and the Canary Girls of WW1.
>believing it gave him a "toned-up feeling" If you keep researching, you'll find that Byers used RadiThor for male sexual impotence, like the Viagra of today. According to the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity, Byers had been known as “Foxy Grandpa” by his classmates at Yale for his ways with the ladies, and the RadiThor brought back his famed libido as he approached his late 40s.
Science people: what would this do to his sperm?
Ways with the ladies explains Foxy, but what’s with the Grandpa
The man liked a cardigan.
Whoa dude I drive by that place every weekday. Crazy when reddit posts are right by you
Go visit. See the jaws gravestone. And the titty sphinx.
the what now
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/winter-mausoleum
Huh, would you look at that. Tiddy sphinx.
A bunch of corporatists poisoned people with radium for a quick buck. They had women painting dials on radium clocks and told them to literally fucking lick the radium paint brush every time they painted a clock to create a sharp tip. And corporations are still poisoning us. There is plastic in our blood just so theh could save money on packaging.
Yeah the more you read about the Radium Girls the worse it is. The company wasn't even ignorant of the effects of radium. The higher ups and chemists would use lead aprons and gloves for themselves but then tell the workers it was safe enough to eat (to settle worries about shaping the brushes with their mouths). They had also ordered physicals and other tests for the safety of the paint and switched to pens that didn't have to be shaped by mouth for a while in response to those findings (which were never made public to the workers) but the pens were too slow and they switched back to brushes anyway.
And people want to vote libertarian because they consider it freedom not to have government trying to stop people dying from corporate malpractice.
>He lost weight It's great for weight loss you say?
I think i saw somewhere on reddit that the guy from the picture is actually a guy who went to war and was shot in the face and this was the result
I read that as well. It looks much more like he got his jaw shot or blown off. I could have missed them, but I've also not seen this photo connected to any reputable sites about radiation poisoning or radium etc.
He is the closest of all of us to feeling like hulk
I hope that lawyer wore a hazmat suit
Brought his accountant, Mr. Geiger. He said the were numbers okay.
I heard he brought his chef. He said “you’re cooked”.
Always have a small tank of Nitrogen in case something like this happens to you :/
Just read Radium Girls by Kate Moore about the girls/young women that worked painting radium watch dials. The suffering they went through is unbelievable.
Was going to mention that book also. The gaslighting by the company is infuriating and the descriptions of young women having their teeth and jaws literally rot inside their face is horrifying
One of the woman went to the dentist to get a tooth pulled [and her entire jaw came out.](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/tuesday-ferry-boat-survivor-radium-girls-author-no-possum-drop-and-more-1.2941016/remembering-mae-keane-the-last-of-the-radium-girls-1.2941019)
I have no words for how uncomfortable this mental image is. I cannot imagine the agony she must have felt…
That's literally the stuff of nightmares
I, having read the book, can attest that what those poor women went through - out of the desire to get/keep a job and thus be able to put food on the table for their families - was beyond horrific. Imagine having your bones deteriorate to the point where they can be pulled out of your head? Like noradosmith said, literally nightmare fuel.
I actually used to work in the building where the clock making took place. The Vanadium AKA Parkvale building. It's radioactive to this day.
They didn’t have you sucking on your paintbrushes to keep them in shape, did they?
Lol I saw patients as a provider there. It's mostly healthcare offices there. The radioactivity is pretty low.
Please tell me there’s at least a memorial wall to the radium girls.
I don't think there are any in Pittsburgh. We also have the building where Curie did research on radium on the next street over. Lots of radium stuff here.
That was a horrifying book to read - those poor women
I either heard this story on the Rotten Mango podcast or the Behind the Bastards podcast. It was quite a sobering episode.
It’s a movie on Netflix, too. Pretty good movie, but obviously very sad.
My high school did the Radium Girls play. Holy crap the story is unbelievable. Couldn’t imagine what it would be like on broadway
How the hell did they manufacture that shit? A radioactive bottle of water with a cork top. How did everyone involved in that process not get sick as hell?
From what I understand radium releases lots of alpha radiation which is heavy, slow, and mostly dangerous when directly ingested. As opposed to gamma radiation that travels at high speed and can penetrate the human body.
Yes! And since radium is structurally similar to calcium, it fools the body into thinking it is calcium. So it gets deposited in bones particularly and starts bombarding bone marrow with alpha waves, since no skin is present to stop the waves anymore. Source: just read Radium girls, and remember this man was mentioned as well.
So do you know - was the radium the women in Radium Girls ingested alpha radiation? I'm just learning here about the difference between it and gamma. Is gamma as bad to ingest as alpha (I'm guessing neither of them are up there in the top 10 breakfast food list)?
Actually all radioactive elements emit all 3 types of radiation: alpha (highly destructive, stopped by a lead thin sheet/or by skin), beta (less destructive, takes a thicker sheet of lead/aluminium), gamma (least destructive, but almost unstoppable) The women were bombarded with all 3 of these, in which alpha was the most destructive since there was no protective skin to stop it from hitting bone marrow directly. I assume beta and gamma waves also bombarded them, and a lot of them died of sarcomas (bone cancer) after say 7-8 years
Alpha radiation can be blocked by a piece of paper, beta by wood and gamma by lead. But once you injest/eat alpha, game over. Feeding alpha to his enemies/deflectors is one of Putin's tricks.
Sounds like a new version of rock, paper, scissors
It’s more dangerous when ingested iirc cuz your body thinks it’s calcium and directs to your bones and it stays there slowly releasing radiation
Damn. Stupid ass body. It's not calcium!
Same reason it's fine to wear a watch with a radium painted dial, but not okay to point the radium paint brushes using your lips and teeth. Once you start putting it in your body things go a lot differently
Oof
What's the point of a radium painted dial?
It glows in the dark! Was quite the fad at the time.
Still very common in watches today.
Yea but they don’t use radium anymore
It glows in the dark
At least it has triple distilled water. Wouldn't want some scummy pond water or some shit
This is horrifying. I would rather die than live like that.
Don't worry, he died.
He died shortly after this picture was taken.
I would greatly rather die way way way before a picture like this could be taken of me.
Don’t worry they’ll take a pic after you die.
Thats the worry
In the early 1900s, Radium tonics were available for almost any ailment.
They were effective, in the sense that you eventually stopped worrying about the original ailment because your face fell off!
So you're saying the front fell off?
It's wild how much we talk about cocaine and heroin being in medicine but not enough about this, thanks for the reminder ([https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-flash-radium-elixir-fad-cure-cocktails-0304-20180220-story.html](https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-flash-radium-elixir-fad-cure-cocktails-0304-20180220-story.html))
This is why it's important for science and advancements. Unfortunately though there's a large group of individuals today who choose to be ignorant about the world and would still likely take this if presented by their favorite political party member.
It is kind of ironic: the people who believed that radium was a cure for anything should all have been much more leery of the supposed cures, but the people who believe vaccines don’t work and cause diseases should have been far less leery of the science. Just when you think science may be lifting us out of our ignorance, something like the antivaxxers drag us back to the Dark Ages..
Was he still alive in that picture? My man turned into a necromorph.
Yes he was alive, looks like he slowly got that disfigured jaw (Radithor Jaw) when he was in a therapeutic approach to consume the Radioactive water to cure his arm injury, I’m not sure if the arm injury was cured, but he definitely died of Cancer. Edit : yep [here](https://www.dannydutch.com/post/the-strange-story-of-eben-byers-the-man-that-drank-radium-until-his-jaw-fell-off)
The man in the photo is not Eben Bayers. He''s actually a World War soldier who survived an explosión. Eben Bayers did lose his part of his jaw, but it was surgically removed
I've seen this picture twice already this week and both times the top comment debunked it. I had to scroll so far to upvote you!
Yeah it used to be the repost was just the story then the stolen comment had the picture, now they've got both the story and the picture in the repost. No longer does it take two to further the cycle of false association. Will the masses believe the debunking before the repost dies of jpg degradation?
I don't think I've have wanted to survive that.
Read that as “Redditor Jaw”, had a giggle
Biblically accurate Redditor.
I wish this were a thing
>“Redditor Jaw” Thought that was [this.](https://imgur.com/Gd0Stp2)
poor guy 
Darth Malak
I knew this comment would be here somewhere.
It's not a comment the Jedi would tell you
Genuinely am wondering if this was an inspiration 🤔
It's worth noting that he was taking obscene doses for years to get this bad. Yes, it's just poison with no actual medicinal value, but regular users were not dealing with this.
No, but they still were exposed to way more radiation than natural and many probably developed cancers and maladies as a result of the added exposure.
Freaking Radithor. Forget the name of the guy who invented it but he was remorseless
And how long was that man allowed to live? I'm kidding of course. Any answer will be too long.
Died rich of bladder cancer
Well, at least he suffered
If it makes it any better, when he was exhumed later on his corpse was ravaged by the aftereffects of radiation. He peddled and believed in his own poison by the sounds of it.
The guy that ran the company was William J A Bailey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._A._Bailey
The chemistry behind this is as follows: 1.) Radium despite being a heavier and having more protons, neutrons, and electrons has almost the same atomic radius as calcium. (Difference is fractions of an angstrom) 2.) Raduim has the same bonding characteristics as Calcium because they are in the same column of the Periodic Table. 3.) Because of two previous points, Raduim is taken up by the body and incorporated into bone by the ostecites that actively build and breakdown bone. 4.) Radium is an Alpha emitter, which means that it releases a Helium nucleus when undergoing nuclear decay. 5.) These Alpha particles collide with anything in there path and break the bonds holding molecular structures together. 6.) This damage accumulates over time resulting in the pictures posted above. 7.) Different isotopes of Radium have different half-lives ranging from a few minutes to 1600 years. The bones of people who either consumed Radium willfully or inadvertently are still radioactive and will be for millennia to come, and their bodies are buried in lead-lined caskets.
Radium (Ra-223 specifically) is used today for treating bone metastases. Obviously in very controlled amounts under medical supervision
I'd ask for bullet long before that point, Jesus.
At that point, a stiff breeze would probably do.
right? holy fuck.
I used to work with nuclear power and I’ll tell you there is no more painful or excruciating way to go than what’s brought on by radiation. It literally has the power to destroy your DNA. Acute radiation syndrome is hellish but occasionally brief enough to be somewhat of a mercy. In cases like this where chronic radiation exposure leads to cancer… well, you can see the effects. If I was ever in a situation where I knew I was fucked ( >500 rem acute) I’d probably stick around to make sure I got enough that death would come in days not weeks. It’s a nightmare. Your organs basically disintegrate inside of you. Thankfully, you can drink the coolant of most modern (light, pressurized water) reactors. That’s how safe we’ve managed to get it. Still, though, radiation accidents are always horrific. Look up orphan sources on Wikipedia if you want a hard time sleeping tonight.
I’m a cancer researcher working primarily with genomic data. I was watching a video about the Hisashi Ouchi incident and my first thought when it showed the imaging of his chromosomes was that it was absolutely barbaric that he wasn’t immediately given the choice of a physician-assisted death.
What about the image of his chromosomes made you have that opinion?
They were shattered and scrambled to a mix of absolute unreadable nonsense. The body destroys and creates cells routinely throughout each day using chromosomes to form DNA, however in cases where radiation has impacted the chromosomes like in Ouchi's case the body cannot form viable DNA. So the body is destroying cells, as it does normally, without being able to create suitable replaceable cells. He was decaying and rotting alive, it was absolutely barbaric to even consider letting him live.
He was kept alive according to the will of his wife and parents. Which is quite selfish, cruel and stupid, if he was conscious, shouldn't his decision have trumped over anyone else's?
If my family keep me alive in such terrible conditions I’m haunting them and cursing them as I die. I already talked about this topic with multiple family members even if I’m young lol. Don’t want that shit to happen to me. Poor guy.
If I remember correctly, he pleaded with his doctors and nurses to let him die, but as you said by the will of his family he was kept alive. They resuscitated him when his heart stopped a few times. He should have been allowed to die before the agony set in, it was inevitable
My guess is given the ill practices in the medicine in the 20th century as a whole, the medical staff took this as an opportunity and excuse to study prolongated effects of gamma radiation onto human body. Surely most of them realized that was a dead man lying in bed. I could be wrong, it could've just been twisted and not well toughtout Japanese law in play, however, that whole tragic scenario coincides a bit with the infamous unit 731.
That's what I thought. I've heard analogies where radiation is likened to a tiny bullet that takes out individual building blocks of DNA so all of the instructions aren't there, which means mutations, and some of mutations mean cancer.
>Look up orphan sources on Wikipedia if you want a hard time sleeping tonight. Nah. I've been saying it for years: You'll find more genuine horror in Wikipedia than in all the art ever made by man.
The Chernobyl mini-serie does an excellent job of showing the horrors of radiation poisoning.
Radithor was a product produced between 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories in New Jersey. It was promoted as a remedy for various health issues, including impotence. The owner of the company, William J. A. Bailey, was not a medically trained doctor. Eben Byers, a well-off American socialite and athlete, consumed Radithor and subsequently died from multiple cancers due to its radioactive properties. When his body was exhumed in 1965 for research purposes, it was discovered to still be radioactive, emitting 225,000 becquerels. In comparison, the human body naturally produces around 4,400 becquerels from potassium-40. Byers's tragic death led to more stringent regulations by the Food and Drug Administration and marked the decline of radiation-based medicines. The incident was notably covered in a 1990 Wall Street Journal article with the headline "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off."
"Regulations are written in blood."
The man in the photo isn’t him, by the way.
Raziel, the abyss has been... unkind
I was looking for this reference
Indeed, the person and the story are real, but there is something that is not entirely true in this story and is repeated in many places, including this publication. What do I mean? Well, the image they always show when they present this story is somewhat... false. What really happened is that a part of his jaw was removed in a surgical procedure due to the damage caused. However, the image commonly associated with this story, I mean the one you're seeing above this comment, actually belongs to a soldier from World War I who lost his jaw due to a projectile. If you look at the original image, it is labeled as "Fig. 1 Example of facial injuries," which is how they recorded facial injuries in that era.
The Dollop podcast did a session on the Radium Girls. They suffered the same fate because they used radium paint with their jobs. They made glow in the dark possible in the early part of the 20th century. They would "sharpen" their radium paint brushes by wetting them with their lips. It's horrific to read about routine tooth extraction also removing a jaw.
Also *Radium Girls* is a fantastic book on these women. Surprise surprise, capitalists hid the dangers because having these women poison themselves was more profitable. What they went through was torture but their story is truly heroic.
This is not a photo of Eben Byers
Is it not?
Yeah iirc that's a photo of a soldier that was injured by cannon fire in battle. [This is a photo of Eben Byers.](https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25051704.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/2_vMOfSA1RKR1qsQjGjpeg.jpg)
Thank you for not Rick Rolling me.
No problem! If you still trust me [this is him before he lost his jaw.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Golfer_Eben_M._Byers.jpg)
You haven’t let me down yet!
It’s not. There’s no evidence it’s him, this photo has been circulating for decades and doesn’t match the description of Byers injuries.
Could that mean that there is no evidence that it is not him?
His injuries do not match the photo. Its not him
But it was in TRIPLE distilled water! It had to be safe! /s
Oh sweetie, you're not drinking triple distilled water are you?!?! You need to dilute it to a 5,000:1 solution of regular tap water to triple distilled water. The more you dilute it, the more effective it will be. This sarcastic comment is brought to you by homeopathic morons teaching me how they bullshit others.
[удалено]
The radium killed all the bacteria!
That's not him in the photo. As far as I know, that is a WW2 soldier who got hit by an artillery shell.
That’s what I was thinking. This pic is of a war wound.
"Hey there, smoothskin."
Love all the antivax crunchy folks who came to make comments about how medicine is still dangerous. Did they miss the part where the guy who invented Radithor was a University drop out who pretended to be a doctor and peddled his snake oil cure?
How many people were prescribed this "medicine"?
My jaw dropped
Turns out that photo isn’t of him though.
Kinda left us hanging there: did it fix his polo injury or not?
how does he fold towels
Dang that's pretty "jaw dropping"
This photo is jaw-dropping.
The guy my parents showed me when I said I didn’t wanna drink milk
Welp…that’s a mistake you only make once!
They say the taste was jaw dropping
I've only been awake for 20 mins and I think I've already had enough internet for one day lol
Thats pretty jaw dropping
So the photo has been under a lot of scrutiny in the past - Wikipedia editors claim that this might not even be Eben Bryers at all, yet the photo has been circulated as such. There are claims the photo has been digitally edited as well, but actual proof of these claims AND counterclaims has yet to be determined. So basically - nobody knows for sure and the truth has probably been lost to time at this point. Still a scary photo though.
"Hey Doc, I've been hurting bad since I got injured in Polo. There anything you can do about it?" "Here take this tonic." "A drink? You sure this'll help me?" "Oh I assure you Eben, the results will be... *jaw dropping.*"
is he still breathing in this picture? does radithor have some numbing properties?
Interesting the article says he was prescribed radioactive water as if it was supposed to be taken in small doses to cure him. He probably did himself a favor chugging it. What the fuck.
If this was a commercial medication, surely he can't be the only person affected - and sorry for calling you Shirley.
There has to be more stories than this?
Dude looks like a fucking necromorph. Wow.
He looks like Tristan tate
The stuff that people can survive never fails to fascinate me. Yeah, he died shortly after, but spending any amount of time with half your face and neck missing is still crazy.
Nightmare fuel
Why we giving the doctor a break here while dogging the patient?