He drank 1,400 bottles of radioactive water because it made him feel great. The Wall Street Journal headline was: 'The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Fell Off.'
Eben Byers was a wealthy Pittsburgh socialite and 1906 U.S. Amateur golf champion — athletic, handsome, and well-connected. In 1927, he injured his arm falling out of a railway sleeper berth and a physician recommended Radithor, a patent medicine containing actual radium dissolved in water.
Radithor was manufactured by William J.A. Bailey, a Harvard dropout who falsely claimed medical credentials. Bailey marketed it as a powerful energizer of the endocrine system and paid physicians a kickback of one-sixth of the cost per dose prescribed. It contained real radium — not a trace, but a measurable, lethal dose per bottle.
Byers loved it. He reported feeling 'toned up' and vigorous, and began drinking two to three bottles a day. He sent cases to friends and female admirers. Over three years, he consumed approximately 1,400 bottles — roughly 400 micrograms of radium accumulating in his bones.
Radium behaves like calcium in the body: once ingested, it deposits in bone tissue and irradiates from the inside out. By 1930, Byers began losing weight and experiencing severe headaches. His teeth fell out. Then his jawbone literally began to disintegrate, destroyed by radiation-induced cancer. Surgeons removed most of it.
A Wall Street Journal reporter visited Byers at a New York hotel in 1931 and filed a story that ran under the headline: 'The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Fell Off.' Byers died on March 31, 1932, weighing under 100 pounds, and was buried in a lead-lined coffin.
His death directly prompted the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on radioactive patent medicines and gave the FDA new authority to regulate health products. Bailey, the manufacturer, faced only a cease-and-desist order — and continued selling other questionable radioactive products until his own death from bladder cancer in 1949.