He had to be buried in a lead lined coffin.

Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

This wealthy way way way back in the day A+ list golfer was a big believer in a drink he thought made him such a great golfer.

It actually killed him.

He drank so much of it that he had to be buried in a lead lined coffin.

Eben Byers (1880 – 1932)
Ebenezer McBurney Byers was a wealthy American socialite, athlete, and industrialist. He won the 1906 U.S. Amateur in golf. He earned notoriety in the early 1930s when he died from multiple radiation-induced cancers after consuming Radithor, a popular patent medicine made from radium dissolved in water

Drink: Radithor

The blessings of radium water made his head disintegrate

The FTC was conducting interviews on the efficacy of a patent medicine and energy drink called Radithor, which was distilled water containing two radioactive substances, radium and mesothorium. The manufacturer, Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey, wildly claimed Radithor, in addition to being an excellent energy tonic, cured a variety of illnesses, including “backward development,” anorexia, hysteria, insomnia and dozens of others.

The beautiful home belonged to a 51-year-old Pittsburgh industrialist and sportsman named Eben MacBurney Byers. Byers had been an enthusiastic proponent of Radithor and reportedly consumed over 1,400 2-oz bottles of the tonic over a five-year period following an injury on a party train following a Yale-Harvard game in 1927. Winn was tasked with interviewing Byers at his home as he was reportedly too ill to appear at the hearing in person.

When Byers opened the door, Winn was horrified: half of his face was missing. Only two “chipmunk teeth” protruded from a bone fragment below his nose. His entire lower jaw and chin was gone, rotted away by radium poisoning. He even had openings in his skull, exposing his brain.

“A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine,” reported Winn in the April 11, 1932 edition of Time Magazine. “Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which 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.”

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Radium-infused lotions, hair products, gels, intravenous solutions (for injecting radium directly into the bloodstream) and even “Vita-radium suppositories” became widely hawked and sold in those pre-FDA days. Radium Hand Cleaner was advertised to “take off everything but the skin.” Magik (sic) Radium Ointment, when applied directly, “can confidently be expected to increase manly courage and vigor.” Vagatone brand radium-infused Gland Tablets were available for “female trouble.” An Alaskan bowling champion named Henry Kosmos sold a quilted muscle-relief sack containing low-grade uranium ore called “Cosmos Radioactive Pad.” A foreign company called A-Batschari even made radium cigarettes, to double your cancer chances.

Luckily for the gullible, radium-obsessed 1920s American consumer, many of these products were bogus and contained no real radium.

The most famous (and saddest) example of the perils of radium is the story of the “Radium Girls,” a group of female factory workers at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey who from 1917–1930 contracted radiation poisoning from painting clock and watch dials with radium-infused, glow-in-the-dark paint. Told by their employer that the paint was harmless, the women ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking (“pointing”) their paintbrushes to sharpen them. Their horrific experiences and subsequent lawsuits eventually led to sweeping changes in worker compensation laws.

Radithor was the invention of a discredited inventor and entrepreneur with a total of zero medical or scientific degrees named William J. A. Bailey. Bailey had frequent run-ins with the law from 1906 up until 1918, when he was fined for fraudulent claims concerning a supposed impotence cure called “Las-I-Go for Superb Manhood.” By 1922 he was back in business, however, setting up numerous radium-related laboratories, including Associated Radium Chemists, Inc. on Eighth Avenue in New York, where he manufactured the Arium tablets.

Bailey’s most financially successful operation, however, was Bailey Radium Laboratories, at 336 Main Street in East Orange, NJ, where he produced Radithor from 1925 to 1930. Radithor was sold by the 30-bottle case (a month’s supply) for $30 — a 400% markup. Each 2-oz bottle was claimed to contain triple distilled water guaranteed to contain at least 1 microcurie each of the radium 226 and 228 isotopes. In a move out of P.T. Barnum’s playbook, Bailey offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the product contained less than the stated amount of radium, which no one did.

Books and pamphlets sang the praises of Radithor, and not just those published by Bailey. In a 1926 book titled “Modern Rejuvenation Methods” by Dr. Charles Evans Morris, MD, he states “Radithor has so far exceeded any previous method of radium water treatment that it has been adopted in hospitals and clinics throughout the world. It gives the greatest possible efficiency in Alpha rays at the minimum expense and thus for the first time since the discovery of radioactivity it brings the blessings of radium water treatment of a highly scientific kind well within the reach of everyone … A child could take this product for years without the slightest injury.” – Source