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Radium: The Deadly Health Fad of the Early 1900s

In 1903, after Pierre and Marie Curie and fellow scientist Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in physics for their discoveries involving radioactive substances, the world seemed on the verge of a miraculous new era in medicine. But when an enterprising newspaper reporter asked Marie Curie about the potential use of radium to cure or prevent disease, she refused to speculate. “Why, I do not know,” she answered. “How can I tell? I am not aware that anything in that direction has been actually demonstrated!” If Marie Curie was hesitant to get ahead of the science, many others weren’t. By 1904, the makers of quack remedies and bogus medical devices were touting the radioactive element radium,…

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Featured

 The Power of Radium

The story of radium illustrates that with the increase in scientific advancements, the information that is portrayed to the public can be easily manipulated. During the 1920s, the general public put a lot of faith into science and the possibility of miracle cures. Radium is yet another example of products, made available to the public in the name of health, that have turned out to be detrimental. Radium exemplifies the continued role professional science plays throughout history of public health in the United States because many instances, like the Radium Girls’ case point out flaws in public health measures created to protect Americans while the full harm of a product is not yet fully understood.

 The radioactive ‘miracle water’ that killed its believers

In the 1920s, Radithor promised to cure everything from wrinkles to leukemia, but its unintended results were deadly.

Articles of Interest

Radium and the Gift from the Women of America

As for the sands of time, radium gave years to some and took years from others. Our knowledge of its effect on the human body owes much to the female body.

Element of the week: radium

Radium is not very interesting to biologists because it is not necessary for life. It is, in fact, quite harmful to life due to its radioactivity and chemical reactivity. However, this did not stop a 30-year radium craze in the United States, where quacks and manufacturers claimed radium to be a "wonder drug" and added it to all sorts of items, from toothpastes and suppositories to foods and even to drinking water, claiming it prevented or cured all sorts of ailments, ranging from arthritis and cancer to mental illness.

For that Healthy Glow, Drink Radiation!

In the early 1900s, radioactive water was all the rage. Hard to believe smart people could fall for such twaddle--right?

How Marie Curie Brought X-Ray Machines To the Battlefield

During World War I, the scientist invented a mobile x-ray unit, called a “Little Curie,” and trained 150 women to operate it

Medicine: Radium Hangovers

Radium-Treated Patients University research center looking for persons who received radium injections or who drank radium solutions, such as “Radithor,” before 1935. Write Z7516— Advt. This advertisement, with the rare privilege of Page One prominence by the New York Times, got results.

Occupational Disease and Women: From the Radium Girls to Garment Workers

No matter what an occupational disease is called, the reality has always been uglier. Sometimes capitalism extracts its pound of flesh metaphorically, and sometimes more literally, but it’s always the workers who pay the price.

Radium revealed: 120 years since Curies found the most radioactive substance on the planet

This substance is the most radioactive natural element, a million times more so than uranium. It is so radioactive that it gives off a pale blue glow. Yet it would still take the Curies another three years to produce a pure radium salt. Having originally worked with 100g of the ore, equivalent to a tenth of a bag of sugar, they would need a tonne of ore to isolate just a tenth of a gram of radium dichloride. They received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for this work, sharing it with Becquerel.

Radium-223 treatment extends life of cancer patients

A new cancer treatment using injections of radium-223 was found to extend the life of prostate cancer patients by an average of 15 weeks, by targeting bone metastases. The radium treatment targets cancer cells and has a short range, leaving healthy cells mostly unharmed and causing minimal side effects.

The Radium Girls: An Illinois Tragedy

: Radium poisoning took the lives of perhaps thousands of female factory workers, many in Ottawa, Illinois, in the last century.

The Radium Water Craze: A Curious Chapter in Health and Marketing

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium sparked a frenzy of interest in its potential health benefits. Companies from various industries eagerly incorporated the radioactive element into their products, touting its supposed healing properties. Radium found its way into everyday consumer goods, including cosmetics, toothpaste, hair creams, over-the-counter medications, health restoratives, bottled water, and watch dials.

Toxicological Profile for Radium

In the case of radium, as well as any radionuclide, it is important to note that, in addition to the usual routes of exposure that must be considered (inhalation, oral, dermal, and occasionally parenteral) for toxic chemicals, there is also external and internal exposure to emissions of alpha and beta particles and gamma rays; and it is these radioactive emissions which are considered to be responsible for most of the biologically deleterious effects observed in exposed persons.

What the Radium Girls Taught Us About Radiation Safety

The plight of the Radium Girls in the 1920s would teach us a great deal about the radioactive element radium and its effect on the human body. It brought to light the dangers of working with radium and created a universal understanding of the need for occupational and radiation safety measures.

When Women Crowdfunded Radium For Marie Curie

The element was hard to get and extremely expensive but essential for Curie’s cancer research.

Why are elements like radium dangerous? A chemist explains radioactivity and its health effects

The element radium can be found in extremely tiny amounts in the Earth’s crust and oceans, and in its pure form it is a soft silvery metal. To an untrained eye, a small piece of radium may look like a chip off a regular gray rock. But radium can invisibly emit radiation – energy and small fragments of itself – that you can’t feel, see or smell. And that invisible radiation can hurt you, without you even noticing right away.

‘Children of Radium’ Review: A Poisonous Family Legacy

In the 1930s, a German-Jewish chemist resettled his family in neutral Turkey. But his work on radioactive materials and poison gas was still of interest to the Nazi regime.

Resources

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Radium is a radioactive substance found in nature. Radium is produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. The intensity of radiation from radioactive materials decreases over time. The time required for the intensity to decrease by one-half is referred to as the half-life. The half-life of radium is approximately 1,600 years.