Radium jaw pictures2/7/2024 A celebrity death that same year, tied to radium water, would finally rouse government to action to halt the sale of medicinal radium preparations.īut years before that headline-making event, it was young working-class women who came to serve as the tragic bellwether for radium poisoning.Īs early as 1925, newspaper articles noted the alarming case of female workers in watch dial factories suffering a degeneration of the tissues of the jaw. ![]() Deaths from repeat exposure were mounting. When a Tribune reporter paid Gable a visit in 1932, the Chicago-area resident offered his visitor a highball, assuring him that “the reported deaths from drinking radium water are due not to the presence of radium, but rather to a cheap (radioactive) substitute, mesothorium.”īut there most certainly was a dark side to radium. He regularly drank a radium “highball,” fruit juice containing emanations, to maintain peak physical condition, the Tribune said. Gable of the Detroit Institute of Technology reported to an audience at a 1931 lecture that a radium-infused beverage was the cornerstone of his health regimen. Renowned doctors touted the benefits of this “elixir of life” and its healing effect on their patients. (The cost of a container may have been within reach of the average person, but radium didn’t come cheap in 1914, according to a doctor’s column in the Tribune, the market price for a single grain of radium was about $5,000. The Tribune predicted that an apparatus for making radium water would become a must-have in a few years. According to a 1913 Tribune brief, the medicinal beverage was created by pouring water into an “earthenware receptacle” containing a small amount of radium, which eventually “charged” the water with emanations. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)Įven more captivating to the affluent members of society was the introduction of radium water. ![]() An annotated photo shows some products spawned by the radioactivity craze: 1) uranium wonder glove 2) Radiumchema pad 3) radium spectacles 4) Rotor Plac 5) radium chocolates 6) radium suppositories 7) Radium Rem, a brick 8) uranium ore pack and 9) Radium Life pad.
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