His illness and death received much publicity, leading to a heightened awareness of the dangers of radiation poisoning, and to the adoption of laws that increased the powers of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to Oliver Sacks's book Uncle Tungsten, Byers 'died grotesquely as his bones disintegrated, like Monsieur Valdemar in the Edgar Allan Poe story.' Byers's gruesome death inspired the Wall Street Journal headline 'The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off.' By 1930, when he stopped taking the remedy, he had accumulated significant amounts of radium in his bones, leading to fractures, lesions, loss of teeth, and eventually the loss of most of his jaw and to the appearance of holes in his skull. In the process he probably subjected himself to more than three times the acute lethal radiation dose.

He drank nearly 1400 bottles of Radithor. He offered physicians a 17% rebate on the prescription of each dose of Radithor.īyers began taking enormous doses of Radithor, which he believed had greatly improved his health.

Bailey was a Harvard College dropout who falsely claimed to be a doctor of medicine and who became rich from the sale of Radithor, which he made by dissolving radium in water to high concentrations, and which he held could cure many ailments by stimulating the endocrine system. Byers complained of persistent pain and a doctor suggested that he take Radithor, a patent medicine manufactured by William J.

In 1927, while returning via chartered train from the annual Harvard-Yale football game, he fell from his berth and injured his arm. Byers eventually became the chairman of the Girard Iron Company, which had been created by his father, and was the U.S. Paul's School and Yale College, where he earned a reputation as an athlete and ladies' man. The son of industrialist Alexander Byers, he was educated at St.

Radium jaw fell off