For that Healthy Glow, Drink Radiation!

The Radium Ore Revigator

I’m currently working my way through ST174 Inside nuclear energy and some of it has been a real eye opener… 🙂

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

A century ago radioactivity was new, exciting and good for you—at least if you believed the people selling radium pendants for rheumatism, all-natural radon water for vigor, uranium blankets for arthritis and thorium-laced medicine for digestion (you don’t even want to know about the radioactive suppositories).

Today we know that exposing yourself to radiation is a bad idea. Even when radiation is used to treat cancer, its deadliness is what does the work, killing cancer cells at a slightly higher rate than normal cells.

But imagine yourself 100 years ago, before many of the first researchers studying radioactivity had died of cancer or other radiation-induced causes. Electricity had been discovered relatively recently, and it turned out to be perfectly safe in moderation, so why not radiation?

Source: www.popsci.com/