![]() Radium therapy was hailed as a medical wonder. In Bath, for example, you could drink radioactive water, find radium bread in a bakery and bring home bottled mineral waters. Other towns across Europe soon followed suit. Elsewhere in the city, you could buy radium soaps, radium cigars and radium pastries. The Radium Palace Hotel offered treatments using water pumped directly from the mines. Realising that the water surrounding the mine could be radioactive, the town capitalised on the interest of the use of radium in medical treatments and started promoting its water cures. And radon, a decay product of radium, was a cheap way to get a bit of that radium magic. St Joachimsthal was the number 1 source of radium in the world. The first radon spa in the world opened in 1906 in St Joachimsthal, now Jáchymov in Czech Republic. Good thing then that due to the prohibitive cost of radium at the time, most of these products contained neither radium neither any of its weaker derivatives. Unsurprisingly, there was no safety regulation regarding the transport of radioactive material. You could buy them at your local chemist, in department stores or even order them by postal mail. ![]() Most of those quack remedies and bizarre objects were readily available. It was advertised as a cure-all medicine for fatigue, arthritis, neuritis and other ailments. Radithor, an early “energy drink” containing radioactive radium. ![]() I’m particularly fond of William Thomas Green Morton’s early 20th century “liquid sunshine therapy” which combined radium, water and light, a distant precursor of Trump’s light and disinfectant coronavirus treatment. It was in condoms, toothpaste, corsets, hair tonics, infant food, creams that gave you a glowing complexion, products that provided “abundant physical fitness” (whatever that meant) and fluids that promised to cure cancer “in all forms, locations and stages.” In the early 20th century, New Yorkers could even buy golf balls filled with radioactive materials that ensured a “high degree radiant energy” and a longer ball fly (the idea of radioactive golf balls was resurrected the 1950s with atomic golf balls that were easy to locate with the help of a Geiger counter.) It could enhance sexual virility and conquer baldness. Scientists, medical practitioners and entrepreneurs -some well-meaning other totally unscrupulous- launched treatments and products that now sound hysterically dangerous. ![]() It was the early 1900s, radioactivity was revered, radium was celebrated in poems. ![]() Shortly after radium was isolated, an atmosphere of enthusiasm and inventiveness took over Europe and the U.S. Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt, a glow-in- the-dark dance costume – to its role as a supposed cure-all in everyday 20th-century life, when medical practitioners and business people (reputable and otherwise) devised ingenious ways of commodifying the new wonder element, and enthusiastic customers welcomed their radioactive wares into their homes. Publisher Icon Books writes: Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal. Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium by Lucy Jane Santos. ![]()
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