Part Two: William Bailey: The Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation

He started selling Yeah, what a hero. He starts selling a radioactive paperweight called the Bioay, which ensured any working man could keep a healthy dose of uranium poisoning at his desk while he worked. Hell yeah, efficiency, that's what you need. He sold a radioactive water solution Befoorinator, which is made with putting it's basically putting thorium in your water. And then there was the ad Dino Ray, his next

foray into the dick medicine game. The a Dinner Ray was a radioactive belt clip that was meant to beam straight radiation into your penis. So really just a great set of products there, Right, he invented the early cell phone. You know, it.

We'll make it through microplastics. As a species. I'm not worried, you know, not that there's not health consequences, but people aren't going to stop breeding just because we've poisoned ourselves. We do that a lot.

faulty chemistry conditions. He also sold the radio Indocrinator, a gold plated radium harness that you could use in several ways when around the neck it would rejuvenate your thyroid and around the midsection it would radiate your adrenals or ovaries.

The radio indocrenator, he claimed, gave off gamma rays that would i the indocrine glands and I'm gonna could from the book quackery again here, the idea was that ionizing i E. Irradiating the indocrine system would increase harmone production, or it was better understood by it's less enlightened audience. The device worked by lighting up dark recesses of the body. The radio indocrenator could even be worn under the scrotum in a special jockstrap rigged up to energize on inspired penises.

So that's good. We're at like three different ways you could expose your dick and balls to radiation. Now, like this guy cannot irradiate enough testicles. Like he just loves it. He loves it. And you know what they say, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. You know, respect you Yeah, yeah, radiate what you love and yeah, you'll never work a day. It is again unclear how much he believed in the therapies he was selling. This is a guy who takes radiation

tonics himself. He clearly believes that this is helpful to some extent as to a lot of people, but also a lot of his ship is like clearly bogus. There's definitely a degree because he's done cons before. There's certainly a degree to which he knows he's conning people, right, So you know, his stuff goes well, though he starts doing better and better and make it getting better at

like conning people. He really one of the things that's going to set him apart from a lot of the pack is he goes directly to the medical community with a lot of his inventions. And part of this is that he's a Harvard man. He knows how to talk to people who went to like these fancy colleges, right. He knows the right things to say, he knows how

to put on that proper attitude. And in nineteen twenty four, William Bailey stands up before an annual meeting of the American Chemical Society and gives a career defining speech about the medicinal potential of toxic radium exposure. He announces, we have cornered aberration disease, old age and in fact life and death themselves in the indocrines. Basically, like, we've backed illness into a corner and it's in the endocrine system.

as you can now. And a lot of people, many of them doctors, are as excited for this moment as people were in two thousand and eight to see the iPhone. So they listened with rapt attention as he walked them through his newly evolved understanding of how radium therapy was supposed to work. By this point, Bailey had convinced himself, or at least decided to market his products under the understanding that aging was caused by the gradual failure of

one's indocrine glands. This process could be reversed by ionizing them with radiation, which would reverse damage and rejuvenate the

worn out glands. Full of pride, he told this audience of scientists, I am satisfied from definitely cinical experience with the radio indocrenator that a method of ionization is now available whereby we can definitely, practically, without exception, retard the progress of cinnocence and give a new lease of relatively normal functioning power to those whose son of life is slowly sinking into the purple shadows of that longest night.

The wrinkled face, the drawn skin, the dully the listless gate, the faulty memory, the aching body, the destructive effects of sterility, all spell imperfect indocrine performance. So that's cool.

he started. He'd started claiming that he'd went on to do graduate work at a prestigious college in London and become a PhD. Right, he's claiming to be a doctor now now again. In reality, his Harvard admission exam he got kind of mid grades on and all of his worst grades were in like scientific fields engineering, physics. He's not only is he not a doctor, but this is specifically the shit he's bad at.

For just twenty thousand dollars, I will walk you through everything you need to do to dig a big hole in your yard and bury all your money in it. You know, this is what Warren Buffett does. This is what Bill Gates is doing. That's why Bill Gates boy a lot farmland. He needs more holes, you know what.

of like irradiating yourself for health. They just without questioning it, like preprint chunks of his speech as an article in the New York Times, so he's doing great. By nineteen twenty five, Bailey moves his headquarters to each Orange, New Joysey and he launches yet another company, the Bailey Radium Laboratories. It was through this company that he would produce his masterpiece, Ratathor.

This was a pre bottled radiation infused beverage. Basically, it's vitamin water if you put a couple horoshima's worth of rats inside it. So he had the ear of a decent chunk of the scientific community and a lot of credulous journalists. And as a result, Bailey decides he's going to do something new to advertise Ratathor, rather than like these standard patent med ads. I mean, I think he's

doing these too, but he starts. He starts advertising specifically in like medical journals and publications, right, And this part is actually pretty brilliant. He's kind of on the cutting edge here. He's aware at this point the FTC and the FDA are looking at him and guys like him right, putting out specific health claims and like a scientific journal

would get him in trouble. He can't do that, but he wants scientific legitimacy, and so he realizes if I just publish research, or at least articles that look like research, talking in general about radium therapy and how radium affects the human body, but without making claims about my products. If I'm just publishing research on radium and it's attached to the name of my company, that acts as an advertisement. But I'm not in danger with the FTC. Right, they

can't come after you for that. Yeah, he's smart. This is an innovation, right, profession. Yeah, so instead of saying the thorinator will cure your depression, he just bought his way into publishing scientific monographs and magazines and particularly publications read by physicians. And I'm going to quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association here one example of

these monographs. A thirty two page pamphlet published in nineteen twenty six under the title Modern Treatment of the Indocrine Glands with Radium Water ratathor the New Weapon of Medical Science, was mailed to every physician in America. The pamphlet outlines Bailey's theories and urges skeptical physicians to place one are two of your most obstinate cases on radium water, so that you may observe its action right in your own practice.

The pamphlet also included many photographs that purport to show the process of radium refinement and purification at the Bailey laboratories. These were later found to be fakes. Bailey simply bought his radium and mesothorium from the nearby American Radium Laboratory of New Jersey, bottling it into skilled water distilled water at his plant and marking up the price more than four hundred percent. But at least its real radiation.

So if you prescribe ratathor to a patient, whatever they spend on it, you get seventeen percent of that as a kickback directly to you. Right, that's smart. Now, to their credit, the AMA does eventually come after it takes them a while, but the AMA is like, this is unbelievably unethical, like incredibly evil, but it works really well. And again, some of these doctors are prescribing it, are prescribing the equivalent of like hundreds or thousands of doses

per patient. So there is good money in this shit, especially because a lot of these patients are rich, right, Like, you are milking the rich by poisoning them with radiation, which like not necessarily always bad, you know, worse, it's complicated.

he is trying. And again he doesn't have any competence as a scientist, but he does try to do his own research here and I'm going to quote from Smithsonian Magazine again. By nineteen twenty five, Bailey had formulated his central pharmacological thesis concerning radium stimulatory powers, as described in a lecture that he gave in nineteen twenty five. This thesis was essentially a variant of the radiation as catalyst

school of thought. More than ninety percent of all diseases, claimed Bailey, were the result of indocrinologic funk dysfunction that prevented the transmission of essential physiological factors. Without the correct metabolic signals, the body lapsed into a state of biochemical energy deprivation. Eventually, this state exhausted the perchonymal organs, resulting in anemia, lassitude, cancer, depression, idiocy, and many other problems.

Bailey believed that the energy lost through ineffective metabolism could be replenished using the power of radium's alpha particles, thus allowing the body to return to its proper state of oxidative metabolic balance through radioactive gland control. Yeah that all scans. That seems real.

off this shit. Now, by this point the boom years of ratathor, evidence had begun to mount that there were horrific long term health consequences to being exposed to radiation. And this is going to bring us to a bit of a digression. But this is a story worth telling, infamous tale of the Radium Girls. It is this is a fuck I think a lot of people are broadly aware of this, which is why I didn't like make it the whole focus. But this is a wild ass story.

It is laid out in gripping detail by author Kate Moore in her book The Radium Girls.

this is where shit gets pretty bleak. As I've noted before, sufficient doses of radium and like toothpaste will make your teeth glow, right, this was the thing people advertised for at the time. This meant that radium, because it can glow,

has the potential practical uses. You can make stuff like watches and dials that need to glow in the dark, glow right for like planes, for military equipment, right, for industrial equipment, and like it's obviously it's useful if you have like a watch that can glow in the dark, Right, you don't have to like, yeah, a road divide our compass, right, you know, all of the different things you need if you're like firing artillery in the night or some shit.

So obviously there's a military application. A lot of this takes off, like radium dial painting takes off as an industry when we get into World War One because there's a sudden demand for the equipment that they need to be able to have, like dials lit up on and This is a demanding job, right, you cannot if you are if you are working on stuff that's going to be military. It's going to be used to like drop bombs and fire shells at people. It has to be precise, right,

you have to be accurately putting everything on. So that is, you know, a job that has to be done by skilled workers. And there's no other way to apply this stuff than by hand. Right, it has to be done by hand, and women with tiny hands were generally seen to be the best at this job. Right, So dial painting becomes.

This is how you get a leg up. This is how you can escape poverty, right, which is again why this is a lot less fun than selling radioactive poison to rich people. Because these jobs are so good, the first women who get them guard them jealously, often recruiting close friends, and they keep it in the family, right. They're like, if there's an opening, I'm going to make sure my sister, my aunt, my niece gets the job,

rather than like somebody off the street. And so one of the things that's going to be devastating about this is that often factories will have like multiple sisters, all the sisters in a family working side by side on the production line, and you know, one guess as to how their lives end right. Other workers at the factory, and this is very important. The radium girls are not wearing any kind of ppe. They are exposed directly physically

through their skin with a mix of radium and paint. Right, it's like mixed into a powder and then turn into a paint. Basically, they have no protective gear. The workers at the factory that is making the paint, that's mixing these pigments, that are processing raw radium, they wear protective gear. Right, they've got like lead aprons. They're wearing gloves like they understand they matter. They in fact are men.

radium and uranium and shit. When people first started fucking with it, I think it kind of there's a high. I don't know if it's like an actual physical high that it affects your brain, but like because of all of the buzz around this, because of how new and exciting is, it deranges people a little bit. I don't I don't know that. I don't think there's like a medical or pharmacological I think it's a psychological thing, but it does appear to be. We'll talk about this in a bit, but that.

wasn't immediately clear. Although as we'll talk about, they did know enough that they should have been taking precautions, right, But they certainly don't know nearly as much as we know now, right. And part of why they're not giving these girls PPE is that the paint used by the

radium girls is so diluted. They're like, it can't this is not enough to be danger And again, part of how they're thinking about this, they're not thinking about this the way we think about radiation, which is like, yeah, you want to be exposed to as little radiation as possible. Right, they're thinking about it as well. In high doses, super concentrated, you know, radium can be very dangerous to people, but in lower doses it's a medicine. It treats these different illnesses.

So it's like they're thinking about it the way we think of aspirin. Right. Obviously, if you were to like chow down on a brick of aspirin, you would get very sick. But if you take a pill when you've got a headache or whatever, you feel better. You know. That's kind of how they're thinking about this, right, So they're like, well, in these doses, it's not going to

hurt these girls right now. Obviously this is absurd. As Kate Moore writes in a column for BuzzFeed, radium's luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon became known as the ghost girls because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark. They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plants so they'd shine in the dance halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth

for a smile that would knock the suitors dead. Grace and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they'd been taught for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some of which were only three and a half centimeters wide. The girls were instructed to slip their paint brushes between their lips to make a fine point, a practice called

lip pointing or lip dip paint routine. As playwright Melanie Marnick later described it, every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little bit of the glowing green paint. So that's that's great, that's good. Yeah, yeah, Now, one of the women who instructed Grace in this technique later recalled to an interviewer, the first thing we asked

was does this stuff hurt you? Naturally, you don't want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you, mister savoys, The manager said it wasn't dangerous, that we didn't need to be afraid. Now, this was a lie. Even giving the incomplete understanding of radiation at the time. They knew enough to know that there was a danger to the jobs these women. Again, the men handling radium and labs are wearing lead aprons and tongs

and shit. These women are not even warned that those precautions exist, right, They're not being told that there is an amount of radium that's dangerous because that is that's common knowledge to scientists, but to lay people, there's no

knowledge that there's any danger to this stuff. That's like widespread and like so, even though I think a lot of these guys legitimately believed they were not being exposed enough to hurt them, these women were not being told that there are any potential dangers to radium, which, like is irresponsible. Is particularly bad because the founder of the US Radium Corporation, which employed the radium girls, was a

scientist named Sabine von Sochoki. He literally invented the paint that they used, and he was aware of the dangers of radium, even in smaller quantities. Again, this is not just some businessman who adopts this because it's good money. This is a scientist. He had worked personally with the Kiris in the earliest radium research. He had seen radiation burns, and he had been injured by radiation himself. And I'm going to quote from the radium girls here, from them

and from the specialist medical literature he had studied. Von Soochoki understood that radio carried great dangers. The curries by that time were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered many burns themselves. Radium could cure tumors, it was true, by destroying unhealthy tissue, but it was indiscriminating in its powers and could devastate healthy tissue too. Von Sachoki himself

had suffered its silent and sinister wrath. Radium had gotten into his left index finger, and when he realized, he hacked the tip of it off. It now looked as though an animal had gnawed it. Of course, to the layman this was all unknown. The mainstream position, as understood by most people, was that the effects of radium were all positive, and that was what was written about in newspapers and magazines. So again, this guy that finger is intent, Yeah, like he cut his own finger off when he got

a little bit of it in there. He knows these girls are taking a risk, and he just doesn't care, right.

co founder George Willis was also really reckless. He would pick up tubes of radium with his like four finger finger and they were supposed to use forceps, but he would just use his hands. And again, these guys are so reckless with this stuff because they just kind of love it, and their colleagues are like, well, these guys are the scientists. If they're doing this, it must be safe.

the bastard. But Thomas Edison was aware of all this and thought it was fucking crazy. He remarked right around this time, there may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered that would produce dire results. Everybody handling it should have care, right. That's again the only time Edison says something perfectly reasonable, but like, yeah, man, they probably should be wearing protection. He's basically like, we don't understand this stuff. You're just you're sticking your arm

into a vat of it? What is wrong with you? Like this burns people. We should be careful here now. You will not be surprised to hear that the effect of all of this radium on the bodies of the young women painting these dials was nothing short of calamitous. The radium that they had eaten particularly settled inside their bodies and basically honey combs their bones with radiation. It

is drilling holes inside their bones like Swiss cheese. This kills their marrow and it causes their bodies to literally collapse in on it themselves like a dying star. One worker, this young woman named Grace, her spine is crushed. She is like given a brace. Basically her spine just crumbles inside of her. Another girl has her jaw eaten away to a stump. Some girls would shrink, they would lose multiple inches because their leg bones are just crumbling and

compacting from the inside. And while all of this is going on, their bones were glowing in the dark, right so fucked up like it is. Some of these women first realized they were sick when they saw their They would see their own bones glowing back at them. In the mirror, like what the fuck, Yeah, it's insane, and like, yeah, we've got a picture here. This is one of the radium girls who has I mean, honestly, I don't mean

to be like blithe about this. It looks like a nineties prosthetic, like if you were going to give someone a fake chin for like a skit where they're you know, you're trying to make them look like Jay Leno or something like that's what. But it's just a tumor. It's like a tumor that's a good eight inches of like chin basically like it's grueser it. It's really thick, I mean it is. It's actually it's more like the mass

of a brick that's just stuck under her jaw. Like the tumors these these young women got are ghastly some of the most unsettling body horrorshit I have ever encountered in my research. Like it is gnarly. And yeah, obviously, by the time you have this kind of radium exposure, there's no cure treatment. You can't fix this, like this is this is by the time your bones are glowing in the dark, you're dead, you know.

oh my god, my job has fucking killed me. I was lied to right now, while they start coming out going to the press trying to like get help, like get you know, basically the equivalent of workmen's comp for getting poisoned at work. The radium industry these companies making the paints, painting the dials deny there is any danger to their products. They basically say, these girls are crazy.

Something else is wrong with them. Radium. We all know radium's a health product, right, and there's so little of it in this paint that no one could get harmed by it, right. And in fact, when the story that radium girls are getting sick breaks in the news, the New York Times is like, well, we got to report on this. See if you know, see what's up to it. You know who can tell us if these girls are

full of shit or not. Our buddy William Bailey. So they call will Bailey, the guy selling radium water, and he's like, there's no proof that radium is responsible for any of these debts. You know, nobody gets sick from radium. This is just nonsense. They're women, you know, they don't know anything.

we're talking about this are are not good people. There are some these girls, you know, when they get sick, this is horrifying, and the physicians who are seeing them and realize what's happened are horrifying, and some very brave crusading physicians basically go to bat against a significant chunk of the medical industry and against the radium industry to like try to get not just get justice for these girls because to an extent that's impossible, but to try

and stop people from being exposed to radium, right because they realize, oh, these girls are getting sick from radium paint. All of these products on their shelves are full of radium. Potentially tens of thousands, hundred thousands of people could be getting sick we have to stop this shit, right and the Radium girls, though I will say, you know these doctors, A lot of these doctors, they testify they are great.

The primary response to this, to this attempt to kind of bring it into this industry, is centered around these Radium girls who are actively dying and basically organize a very effective crusade to bring their employer to some sort of justice and to put a stop to this shit. And these again, this is an incredibly heroic story. These girls are aware we cannot be saved, right. We are doing this to stop other people from getting sick and dying.

Grace Fryer, who is one of the one of the Radium girls, said at the time it is not for myself I care. I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example. Kate Moore writes quote as Grace, who led their fight, determined to find a lawyer, even after countless attorneys turned her down, either disbelieving the women's claims, running scared from powerful radium corporations, or being unprepared to fight a legal

battle that demanded the overturn of existing legislation. At the time, Radium poisoning was not a compensable disease. It hadn't even been discovered until the girls got sick. And the women were also stemy by the Statute of Limitations, which ruled that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal cases within two years. Radium poisoning was insidious, so most girls did not start to sicken until at least five years after they started work. They were trapped in a

vicious legal circle that seemingly could not be squared. But Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account. Eventually, in nineteen twenty seven, a smart young lawyer named Raymond Barry accepted their case, and Grace, along with four colleagues, found herself the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama. By now, however, time was running out. The women had been given just four months to live, and the company

seemed intent on dragging out the legal proceedings. As a consequence, Grace and her friends were forced to settle out of court, but they had raised the profile of radium poisoning. Just said Grace, as Grace had planned, and you know this is again. You know, they're not able to take the radium girls, this first group of them grace. They're not able to take this case as far as they want to because they don't have much time. But they settle. They get money for their families, and this becomes an

international story. And so thousands, hundreds, you know, at least hundreds of other women, and I also assume an equal number of men at least working in various industries with radium, find out for the first time that this shit is dangerous, right, And it is like, this is like a horror movie scene. Right as these as these stories start to come out and they're being read in offices where people are using radium paint and doing other shit with radium, right, One dive.

keep working after you learn this. Well, you got to keep in mind a lot of the shit is breaking right at the start of the Great Depression, right and in the middle of the Great Depression, and so people are suddenly aware, oh my god, this is killing me.

But also you know it will kill my family. Is if I can't buy food from my kids that I'm a single mother to suddenly if we get shit pushed out on the street when there are no other jobs, so they really this is like it's an impossible situation, right, you don't want to die of cancer.

some products, folks, right now we're back. So this is it's also you know, part of why people don't quit immediately, why there's like a lot of confusion in the industry among these workers is just like, well, we still need money, and another part of it is that the companies, all these radium companies, they're kind of I haven't read precisely if the tobacco industry looks at how these companies respond when they formulate their own responses later in the century

to a similar sort of like you know, revelation, but they use a lot of the same tactics that will later be used by big tobacco. And the biggest one is they flood the zone with disinformation. The Illinois firm that Wolf worked at, Radium Dial denied any responsibility. And the way that they do this is they come out and they say, you know, we're concerned obviously about our workers. We don't want anyone to get hurt. So we did

medical tests, you know, we studied. We did tests on these women who got sick to try and see if they had radium poisoning. Now here's the thing. They had done medical tests on these employees, and those tests had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of these women had radiation poisoning. So what does Radium Dial do. They just lie, They just say the test didn't show anything, and they burned that fucking research to further muddle waters.

They paid for a full page ad where they stated, if we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would have at once suspended operations.

Not only are they putting out propaganda, but when their workers die, obviously, families who are losing their kids could pay for an independent autopsy, could have research done, could have these bones studied, and that would prove that these girls, they steal the bones of these dead girls to hide, to like destroy them so that it can't be like they are the bones of their employ their dead employee, that is.

that she wentz in my nightmare. She's like picking fragments of her jawbone outside of her mouth, out of her mouth, like because it's just crumbling inside of her.

She fucking organizes a legal campaign against them. She sues, she's fucking these all of these ladies are fucking awesome. She sues her employer, which is one of you know, and this is like, not only is this not easy because they have a lot of money, but her neighbors start coming after her when she sues the Radium Dial company. Because it's the Great Depression, there's not a lot of other employers, so they're like, you're threatening everyone's ability to

make a living right. They don't care that they're in danger too.

for a whole raft of new regulations. A lot of our working workers regulations come out of the backlash to what happened to these girls. And in fact, Catherine and this whole, like the series of court cases launched by the Radium Girls, are a major factor in the establishment of OSHA. Right, this is a big part of how we get OSHA, and you know it is obviously does not save any of these young women, but they are continuing to save lives to this day. Before OSHA, about

fourteen thousand Americans died on the job every year. And again, this is like when the country's a third the size that it is now today, about forty five hundred workers die in the job every year, right, still too many, but like that is like the improvement. These girls saved a lot of lives, you know, while losing their own. It's as admirable as story as I've ever heard. So that is a long digression from the story of William Bailey, although he did tie into this. You know, he's given

comments to The New York Times. But you can't really talk about radium poisoning without talking about the Radium Girls,

nor should you. So one crucial difference here between what the Radium Dial Corporation and these other radium companies that these girls work at is doing, and what Bailey is doing is that the death toll of the radium dial companies is very well documented because we have all these these women who go to work there and they get sick, and we know they died, and we know it was because of the radium that they were exposed to at work.

We don't know how many people died or were maimed as a result of all of the radiation they got from Will Bailey's products, Like because in number one, it's a lower dose than the radium dial girls are getting, but they're taking it sometimes and these people are taking it for years and then maybe ten years later they get a cancer and like, well they were a smoker too. Now, of course we know that if you're a smoker, you're going to get more lung cancer faster if you're also

exposed to radium. Right, it is not known. We will never know how many people do eyed because of this guy's stuff. But like he's tens of thousands of people are taking the radium products that he makes, maybe more. I think his death toll is significant. I think I'm guessing this guy's got at least a nine to eleven on him, you know, but I don't think it's provable, right.

It should also be noted that the Radium Dial Corporation and others were at least manufacturing products that did something right. They had a function. Bailey is just selling pure snake oil.

not immediate. As late as nineteen thirty, the FDA had taken no serious action against Bailey or his compatriots, and these this last court case like ends in nineteen twenty eight, right, so there is starting to be backlash building and people agitating to like really restrict where this stuff can be used. But in nineteen thirty, the FDA is still like, we don't have any legal basis to go after this guy.

Several warnings. The FDA does publish warnings because of all of these grizzly photos of dyeing dial painters, but they don't really do anything. The FTC is a bit faster on the draw. In nineteen twenty eight, which is the year that Catherine Wolf sues the Radium Dial company, they start an investigation into William Bailey's company right particularly into

the claims he's making about Ratathor. But this takes a while to work its way through the system, so in nineteen thirty, two years later, they finally charge him with false advertising. Now unclear if that would have been enough to bring him down. He has enough money at this point to have fought this. But this charge comes across at the same time as another very significant development, which is what's going to actually bring it into not just Bailey,

but this whole industry. And of course it's a rich white guy getting sick from radium poisoning, right, No, that leads to real fast changes even the m buyers is an upper class athlete. He's a competitive trapshooter, and he was the champion of the US Amateur golf tournament.

it is you can't even sing. It is funny that, like you have these deeply sympathetic, really incredible people, these these radium girls get sick and die and it slowly brings change. But like the worst man in the world, it's sick on radium and it's this instant fucking backlash. Yeah.

this Ratathor shit, it'll cure you. Buyers tries it, and he likes it. Right, He feels energized. He starts feeling like his old self again. He can get hard, he can play golf again. I don't know. Is this the placebo effect? He just finally did his Was his arm just actually healing and he should have given it more time? I don't know, But he claims to feel fucking great, and in fact he falls. He he is like the power user of Ratathor. Right, He's drinking on a daily basis.

He's drinking three times the maximum maximum recommended dose, and he loves it. That his gifts. He starts buying cases of it for his friends and loved ones.

thirty one, buyers began to experience increasing complications. His bones seemed to be eating themselves, splintering and dissolving one by one. His marrow failed and his kidneys stopped working. A brain abscess destroyed his hearing. By the end, he was bedridden, unable to move her here, but still alive and horribly alert. Now his social prominence means you cannot sweep this under

the rug. This is a famous rich guy. A radiologist Joseph Steiner, who looked at the radiographs of Buyer's rotting bones, launched a crusade of his own. He had to take action because the other doctors who worked with Buyers, including Buyer's personal physician, refused to acknowledge that this was radium intoxication, right, I think, because they're all getting kickbacks, like, no, man, you're not sick because a radium. You just need to, yeah, drink more milk. So this guy Steiner is like, no,

this is fucking radium poisoning. He's been poisoned by this stupid drink he's taking. And you know, he makes this enough of a noise about this that a government commission is formed to investigate, and they have buyers again. He becomes another person. He testifies from his sick bed right before he dies to this commission. An attorney who was present to that testimony later described quote, a more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.

We went to Southampton, where Buyers had a magnificent home. There we discovered him in a condition with Beggar's description, young in years in mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive jaw operations, and his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw, had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating and holes were actually forming in his skull. Jesus Christ, Yeah,

pretty fucked up, pretty bad. On December nineteenth, nineteen thirty one, the Commission issued a cease and desist to Bailey's company. This did not help buyers. He dies in early nineteen thirty two, but his death provided the impetus for the fdaight to push for expanded power so that they can take action against quack medication. A lot of the FDAs what teeth it has come out of this period. As a result of this, a backlash boiled over from the

medical community against patent drugs like Ratathor. Regulations came quickly, and Bailey's business collapsed. He escaped any personal consequences for this or his role in any other countless number of deaths, though we know of at least one female friend of his who died because he kept giving her ratathor, but the number of people who developed cancer as a result of taking his and his other products is kind of unknown. Bailey does become persona and on grata. After this point,

he's you know, the press starts going after him. He's like hounded in the streets by journalists and stuff. There's these constant inquiries from like Newark public health officials. Eventually he has to flee town. Right worker or reporters find him at his office front at the Adeno Ray Company in East Orange and when they ask what kind of

business he's conducting, he's like, it's an advertising business. And they're like, well, the name on the door is the same as this radiation product you were selling, and he's like, oh no, the name on the door doesn't mean a thing. I'm not selling anything radioactive. Eventually, he has to like drop out of public life entirely, although weirdly.

of this. Some of it's lies, Like he claims that he was the manager of an IBM electronics division during the war, and we don't actually know if that's the case or not. There's not evidence of it.