Copyright by Robert Wendell Holmes III 2010
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Copyright by Robert Wendell Holmes III 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Robert Wendell Holmes III certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Substance of the Sun: The Cultural History of Radium Medicines in America Committee: ____________________________________ David Oshinsky, Supervisor ____________________________________ Bruce Hunt ____________________________________ Alan Kraut ____________________________________ Jeffrey Meikle ____________________________________ Michael Stoff Substance of the Sun: The Cultural History of Radium Medicines in America by Robert Wendell Holmes III, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2010 Acknowledgements Thanks to David Oshinsky, who has supported and encouraged me since my first graduate seminar almost seven years ago. His historical insight and passion for good writing have made my dissertation far better than it would have been otherwise. Whether his feedback was positive or negative, it was invariably accurate and always helpful. Thanks too to Bruce Hunt for providing me with critical avenues to explore and ideas to consider throughout the long process of this project’s conceptualization and writing. Michael Stoff’s example and advice have helped me become a stronger teacher, writer, and scholar. The other members of my dissertation committee, Jeffrey Meikle and Alan Kraut, also provided helpful suggestions for improvements in both substance and style. The University of Texas History Department has been a wonderful place to spend my graduate career thanks in large part to faculty members I have worked with and for over the years. Robert Abzug, Norman Brown, Neil Foley, George Forgie, Neil Kamil, Al Martinez, Howard Miller, Karl Miller, Robert Olwell, Megan Seaholm, and Jim Sidbury have all helped me along the way. Graduate Coordinator Marilyn Lehman is also deserving of thanks for her knowledge and patience in the face of questions that I should have known the answers to. My graduate student colleagues in the History Department have also made these seven years intellectually fertile and just plain fun. Thanks to William Morgan for being a great teaching partner. Paul Rubinson and Jessica Luther deserve thanks for putting together the Mephistos graduate conference at UT and allowing my own paper to cruise iv through the vetting process. Thanks especially to Zach Montz and Matt Tribbe for providing everything from dissertation chapter feedback to commiseration to ideas for new cocktails. They helped me get through this enormous and, at times, frustrating undertaking, and I can’t imagine my years here without them. I offer sincere gratitude to the American Philosophical Society for a Library Research Resident Fellowship and to UT’s Institute for Historical Studies for a Doctoral Research Fellowship, both of which helped fund crucial summer research trips. This dissertation owes a great deal to the patience and efforts of countless archivists. Thanks to all those at the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, the American Institute of Physics, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the American Medical Association, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Thanks to all of my friends old and new, in Austin and elsewhere, and to Margaret Madigan for her warmth and support down the final stretch. Finally, I owe a great deal to all three of my parents—Barbara Sobkowiak, Bob Holmes, and Conrad Sobkowiak—who have never wavered in their support throughout this process and, indeed, throughout my life. v Substance of the Sun: The Cultural History of Radium Medicines in America Robert Wendell Holmes III, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: David Oshinsky From the moment Marie Curie announced the existence of radium, the strange new element captured the imagination of the American public. Radium, it seemed, could do anything. It gave off its own light and heat and appeared to realize the ancient alchemical dream of transmutation. It also showed promise as a medicine. The press ran with the idea that radium was a panacea that would cure everything from cancer to wife- beating. Soon it became impossible for the public to know what to believe when it came to radium and its effects on the body. Patent medicine companies exploited the murkiness surrounding ideas about radium, marketing a slew of products that claimed to harness the element’s healing and energizing powers. Meanwhile, physicians made slow, careful progress in defining the parameters of radium therapy, narrowing their focus to cancer. The popularity of radium patent medicines peaked in the 1920’s when hundreds of thousands of Americans purchased one or more of the dozens of radium products that proliferated at the time. Government regulators and members of the medical establishment sought to push these products from the market, but loopholes in the regulatory apparatus created under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 allowed many of vi these companies to operate freely. Two scandals—the saga of the “Radium Girls” and the death of Eben Byers, a well-known industrialist who died after drinking over 1000 bottles of a radioactive tonic called Radithor—damaged radium’s image in the 1920’s and 1930’s. By the late 1930’s, strengthened regulatory laws helped push radioactive products from the marketplace. During World War II, scientists discovered artificial isotopes that proved more effective and less expensive than radium in the treatment of disease. For decades Americans had struggled to make sense of a scientific discovery that seemed to challenge fundamental ideas about the nature of the body and its relationship to the physical world. The ambiguities surrounding the element posed a unique challenge to progressive ideals of expertise and professionalization while providing a malleable image of energy and health that a variety of commercial interests could deploy. vii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: Radium Enters the American Imagination……………………………….27 Chapter Two: Early Radium Medicine in the Popular Press……………………………69 Chapter Three: The First Commercial Radium Medicines…………………………….102 Chapter Four: Toward Radium Orthodoxy…………………………………………….140 Chapter Five: Radium’s Commercial Heyday: The 1920’s…………………………...176 Chapter Six: Radithor and the Downfall of Commercial Radium Medicine…………..213 Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………...250 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………271 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………...278 viii List of Illustrations 1.1. Comic Strip, “The Wonders of Radium”…………………………………………...48 1.2. Comic Strip, “When Radium Puts Money Out of Business”……………………….52 2.1. Radol Advertisement……………………………………………………………...109 2.2. Radium Radia Advertisement……...……………………………………………...127 ix Introduction Along with my earaches and asthma, I had sinus trouble. There was some ‘new treatment’ for this ailment being discussed in the neighborhood. It involved stuffing radium into your sinus cavities. (Have you ever heard of this?)…The doctor had a long wire thing—maybe a foot or more, and on the end was a pellet of radium. He stuffed it up my nose and into my sinus cavities on both sides. (I should probably check to see if my handkerchief is glowing in the dark).1 So wrote Frank Zappa in his 1989 autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book. Though told with Zappa’s trademark irreverence, the anecdote reveals a great deal about the public’s complex and often contradictory attitudes toward radium, an element that many hailed as a “miracle” when it was discovered around the turn of the century. During the half century between the discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie and Zappa’s childhood experience with the element, ideas about radium and radioactivity oscillated between wild enthusiasm and fear, but by the 1950’s, radium was on its way out. Artificial isotopes, a useful byproduct of the atomic bomb program, were replacing radium in the oncologist’s armamentarium. Strengthened regulatory laws made selling radioactive products over the counter illegal. The nasopharyngeal radium irradiation practiced by Zappa’s nameless doctor was one of the element’s last gasps, a vestige of its once wider use. What had happened during the first half of the twentieth century that caused radium to fall so far? Zappa’s story is instructive. His experience with the element demonstrates the extent to which radium was never really well understood by the American public. The success of radiation treatments for cancer had been well 1 Frank Zappa, with Peter Occhiogross, The Real Frank Zappa Book (New York: Touchstone, 1989), 20. 1 established by the first decade of the twentieth century. The mechanism of radioactive cancer treatment was fairly straightforward: rays bombarded the cancerous tissue and destroyed it while damaging as little healthy tissue as possible. Radium’s effect on an ailment like sinus trouble, however, was more mysterious. The primary justification for the use of radium in such a case was the element’s decades-old reputation as a miracle cure. Early newspaper stories trumpeted radium as the cure for virtually every ailment the flesh is heir to. This notion of radium as a cure-all had remarkable staying power and, even after fifty years, continued to make radium seem like a “new treatment”