Part One: William Bailey: The Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation

Robert sits down with Sofiya Alexandra to talk about Will Bailey, the fake doctor who made himself into the king of radioactive fake medicine and killed an unknown number of people in the doing.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where my
headphones were not plugged in when I started talking, and
now they are. We we have a we have a keen,
eagle like grip on on on the professional competence required
to do our jobs. Uh, Sophie and I uh, and are.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Much funnier when the headphones that are not plugged in
aren't like small I bought it, like you knows, but
like the big black ones. That is so much funnier.
I had.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
I had a lot of opportunities to get this right. Sophia, Alexandra,
Welcome back to the pod. Sophia, how how have you been?
How's it going? How's the world bad?

Speaker 4 (00:48):
The most terrible?

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Thank you? Yeah, thanks for having me on the pod.

Speaker 4 (00:54):
I am good.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
It's been a minute. It's so nice to see y'all's faces.
I've missed you.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I missed you too. And you know, obviously, Sophia,
as you're aware, as I think most people are aware.
As a podcast host, I maintain medical power of attorney
over each of our guests. Now, this is probably standard
standard in the industry. My understanding is it's a holdover
from English common law established in the sixteen hundreds by
the very first podcasters. So the other day you called

(01:24):
me up and you said, Robert, should I dose myself
with moderate quantities of radiation to gain unclear unspecified health benefits?

Speaker 4 (01:33):
And I sure did?

Speaker 2 (01:34):
And I was like, let me look into that, Sophia,
let me look into that. So I did. I did
a quick google. Is it bad to radiate yourself for health?
And it turns out yes, that's what we're talking about
this week, is the radium.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Christ You wrote that entire scripted, that whole bit.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
I scripted the whole bit, Sophia.

Speaker 4 (01:50):
Scripted that entire thing is so you of you. That's
so funny.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
It makes me think of like you doing stand up
writing out all of the parts where you're.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Like, come right, you guys, Yeah, your little life plug
throws to the audience. Sure, No, I mean what this
is is I have a little This is a free
productivity hack for you writers out there. If you have
a whole thing you have to write, like, say, eight
thousand words about radium grifters, and you're being you're being
a procrastinator. Maybe just spend a paragraph or two writing

(02:24):
out some bullshit jokes to your friends. You know, and
then just keep it in the script. Why not. Nobody
has to read these button me, so you know, it
doesn't have to be tight.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well that was cool, But I'm just excited that Sophia
is here.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
I'm so excited that Sophia is here, and she's got to.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Be a new Patreon.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Let's start there.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, let's begin with the plugs.
That's the right way to do this.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
Oh shit, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
Come to patreon dot com slash Sophia Alexandra. There's writing
on there, there's videos. There is just random shit I'm into,
like galer and and relationship anarchy and making clay pots
and John Lee Hooker. I don't know, I'm a weird bitch.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Come through.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well check that out, and you know, check out check
out Sofia. Alexandra's many other podcasts that she's done with
us too, some of our our very best. And this
is about to be this one, Sophia going to be
a classic because we're getting back to our roots here.
You know, we've been covering some dark shit a lot
on this show, and you know, we've really gone hard.

Speaker 4 (03:29):
Really comes as a surprise to me.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
This is the old one that is guested on more
Dead Baby episodes than anyone.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
No Dead Baby crazy that this is gonna be a
dark one.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
A lot of dead people, but not dead babies.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
Thank you for me.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
But it's it's a fun mostly up until the second episode,
mostly funny ways that people are horribly injuring themselves because
it's good. It's good old timey medical nonsense. Right, it's
people just poisoning their bodies with urine because they think
it'll it'll help him deal with a cough. It's super
funny if you can kind of associate yourself from the
human cost Hey, which.

Speaker 4 (04:07):
Is a soil podcast, Daddy, I am ready.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, Yeah, it's going to be a good time. So
the history of people using radiation as like a pop
medical treatment, the way they use colloidal silver today, starts
in eighteen ninety five, when a German physicist named Wilhelm
Rotingen discovered X rays for the first time. He published
an article on a new kind of rays fifty days later,

(04:33):
which is what we're all looking for in life, right.
I'm usually referring to ray bands there, but Ray.

Speaker 4 (04:38):
Talking about guys named Ray.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Usually when guys named Ray, I've had good relations with
guys named ray.

Speaker 4 (04:45):
You know, I only fuck men named ray. It's terrible.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
That's like like that that diet where you only red
things like yeah, yeah, just as evasive.

Speaker 4 (04:55):
Yeah, I'm either celibate or I get hit a lot.
That's what it is.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
That is the duality of ray.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Hey everyone, my notes on this were a little messy.
I just wanted to add that while it was Rojin
who discovered X rays, the guy who actually kind of
discovered radioactivity as a phenomenon was Henri Beccarel. He worked
with the Curi's. He shared a Nobel prize in Night
you Know three with Pierre and Marie Curriy. It was
I believe Marie Curriy who named radioactivity, but Henri was

(05:26):
the guy who kind of first started discussing the phenomenon
after the discovery of X rays. So, in eighteen ninety eight,
famous scientist power couple Marie and Pierre Curie found radium
and a sample of uranian height. These are kind of
we're going over like sort of the birth of understanding
radiation as a thing. Radium was soon found to have

(05:47):
properties that were like similar to X rays. Right, you
could like expose photo negatives and stuff with it and
a new field of study in this kind of wondrous
and magical property that certain cereals had started to open up.
And obviously X rays I mean even today, like reading
about studying radiation, it's like wild, It's like space alien shit, right,

(06:09):
So obviously people in the late eighteen hundreds starting to
realize how radiation works. Is it's not just like fascinating
to scientists, but it also you know, honestly, a good
comparison note is in popular culture, radiation was treated in
this period very similar to how people are treating AI now,
where like some people are you know, just trying to

(06:32):
be reasonable about it and say like, well it may
have this application of that, and other people are saying
this is the silver bullet to every problem in society,
you know. Now it's like we can just add AI
to every problem and it'll fix it. And like you
just got to radiate everything hunger, Yeah, yeah, and that's
the attitude they're like, yeah we can in world hunger,
you just irradiate all your craps. It'll be great. Yeah.

(06:55):
That is that is like how this where this is
going to go. A Japanese scientific journal published Rotentin's work
in eighteen ninety six. Japanese physicists constructed one of the
first X ray machines the same year to beam crystals
with X rays for purposes that are not clear to me.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
The first X ray crystals like like like the rocks,
like quartz or but yeah, he was shooting them.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
I think he was like, crystals are cool, X rays
are cool. Let's see we can see what happens.

Speaker 4 (07:25):
It's a real PB and J situation.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
They had X ray machines in Japan for like a
surprisingly long time before anybody started using them for like
medical purposes. They were just like shooting random shit with
them to see what it would do that, which is
fair yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Kind of awesome and what I would do so.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Yeah yeah yeah basically.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
So that's why I'm not a doctor.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's why I'm not. But you know, these
people barely wear right. It was the eighteen nineties. Most
early radiation researchers did learn quite quickly that this stuff
was They didn't. I wrote that they learned it was
not something to play with. They with it constantly, but
they learned that it was a dangerous thing to play with.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
Marie Currie herself suffered pretty significant radiation burns a number
of times touching this stuff. She's also like she and
her husband both die horribly as a result.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
I was just gonna say, I was like, Dad, she
fucking died from it.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
I think Robert like she dies decades later, but like.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, maybe saying like you can suffer a burn in
your life and keep going, but.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
I think it's the painful death for me.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah. What I'm saying is that, like, well before the
painful death, they knew that, like, oh shit, this is
like bad for us, right, Like we're hurting ourselves by
being near this shit. Yeah, Like Pierre Curie made a
statement in nineteen oh one that like, I would not
want to be alone with a pound of pure radium
because I think it will burn. I don't know this,
no one's ever had this much, but I think it

(08:49):
will burn all of the skin off of my body
if I'm close to that much of it.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
And by somewhere in Hollywood and Actress was like, eh,
oh that the skin off my body.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah. So, you know, by the turn of the century
again like five years into you know, serious research on
this stuff, like several researchers had already died due to
radiation exposures. So again within the scientific community, as much
exuberance as there is about you know, radium and uranium,
people are very much aware this shit is like deadly.
We don't fully get why it's deadly, but we know

(09:21):
that it is super dangerous to be around in quantity. Right,
So after witness, now, one of the side effects of
this is that like people aren't people are seeing how
dangerous this stuff is. They're seeing the kind of horrible
burns it can cause. One of my favorite stories like
one of the scientists working on this keeps some like
radium in his pocket and it like burns a hole

(09:41):
through his leg. But when what.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
When did you notice that it started burning and he
just kept it in there.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
I think maybe I'm wrong about this, but my reading
of it, I think it's the sort of you know
how like at that bored Ape yacht club party, they
had those UV lights that just look like normal UV
lights but were for disinfecting slaughterhouses, and so it gave
everyone horrible sunburns on their eyes, Like, oh.

Speaker 4 (10:06):
My god, I didn't know that.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
Oh yeah, they used So there's you know, people put
UV lights in like dance, you know, like rave parties
and stuff all the time.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
But there's also UV lights that are meant to like
disinfect slaughterhouses, and somebody got the wrong UV light in
this party and it gave people like sunburns on their eyes.
But they didn't notice it until like the next day. Right,
It wasn't immediate. They weren't immediately aware that anything was
was awry. They just kind of woke up Burning. I
think it's like.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
That we woke up Burning is the first country song
that I had to put out on my Patreon.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, it's about your experiments with radium.

Speaker 4 (10:43):
It's about a uti actually.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
But yeah, so Pierre Curie like he sees his friends
get in his wife getting horribly burned by radium, and
he's like, well, this stuff is dangerous, but also if
it can burn skin this way, maybe we could burn
away cancer, right, And that is the start of chemotherapy,
is like some of these scientists realizing like, well, the
way that this burns people, you might actually be able

(11:05):
to effectively like kill tumors and stuff with it.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Okay, just someone that has chemo, I'm like totally did
not make that connection. Yeah, in terms of yeah, wow.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
That's that's I mean that's that's what you're doing basically
with chemo is Yeah, you're like, you're you're effectively using
radiation as a laser to murder a tumor. Well, my
basic understanding that.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
No, because chemo is chemicals.

Speaker 4 (11:31):
Well yeah, I mean it's not like we're talking about
the other treatment.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
You're talking about actual radiation, which I.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Also had, which I think it's like skin cancer they're
they're dealing with first, right, is my guess, Right.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, because that's probably the simplest it's on the surface,
until they figure out how to like actually, you know,
radiate like tumors inside you, which I'm sure took you know,
at least another week.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, a while, But like so they start figuring out like, Okay,
this stuff is dangerous. It can hurt people pretty badly,
but if you use it the right way, you can
actually like kill cancer with it, right, which is you
have to think about where medical science is in early
nineteen oh one, the early nineteen hundreds. That is, this
kind of reinforces the attitude that these radioactive materials are

(12:16):
fucking magic, because cancer is just fucking death, right, It's
the hand of God. There's nothing to there's very very
little treatment available for a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:27):
And suddenly, can I ask the dumb question, Yeah, when
did people start realizing what the fuck cancer was?

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (12:35):
I mean, I mean for thousands of years we have understood,
you know, we didn't maybe we didn't have the kind
of understanding we have about it now, but we knew
that certain people would develop tumors and stuff and that
that was inimical to life, right, And I think you know,
like physical removal of like skin cancer and stuff like

(12:56):
that has gone back a while. Although it was obviously
like of of middling ethics. This is this is kind
of the beginning of us starting and obviously we still
don't have a great handle on cancer, but this is
like you have to you have to keep in mind.
The possibility of any sort of effective cancer treatments beyond

(13:16):
the crudest and most violent is like that hits the
medical community like a bomb, right, Like it's it's it's
a miracle almost, Like that is how they're thinking about it, right.
Some of that is irrational exuberance. They think it's going
to work better than it does because it takes a
long time for this to get more effective. But like
there is this that's going to play into the the

(13:38):
way people think about radiation and it as a miracle cure.
Is that like, yeah, it's the first thing that's given
people really effective hope against cancer. That's a big deal. Obviously.
I'm going to quote from an article in the Journal
of Medical History by Micah Nicau. Quote. The first to
use X rays for skin diseases was physician Leopold Freud
of Vienna, who treated a patient's pigmented No, no, no, Freund,

(14:02):
not Freud Freud oh, okay, which I think means friend,
I don't know, I don't know. German Neil's rereiberg Finsen's
light therapy for tuberculosis of the skin by that time,
also achieved a reputation. Radiation therapy spread quickly, and X
ray technologies were introduced to many hospitals for the diagnosis
and treatment of diseases such as broken bones, exema, and
skin cancer. Radioactivity from radium seemed similar to X rays,

(14:23):
giving scientists in medical doctors high hopes for the medical
use of radium before understanding the actual chemical and physical conditions.
In terms of modern science, Doctors in different parts of
the world, including Germany, in the United States used radium
in the treatment of diseases such as keloids, tuberculosis, syphilitic ulcers, hyperthyroidism, tumors,
and cancers. Some of these treatments work. Some of this stuff,

(14:45):
like tumors, you can effectively treat with radiation. I think
syphilitic ulcers are not helped by radiation, but they're just
kind of they're trying it on everything, you know, they're
giving it a shot.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
I mean it's hard. Syphilis, Like, honestly, syphilis goes hard.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
I've always said that, you know, Yeah, yeah, that's why
I respect it.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
That's why it's like Wharton, syphilis is out here making
you crazy.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
Long term, that shit goes.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Hard, making you crazy, and possibly contributing to the birth
of horror as a genre. You know, So respect respect
to syphilis exactly.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
I'm sorry, that's merch respect to syphilis.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah. So one thing that's interesting to me is, right
from the very start, even among people who knew better,
there's obviously all this enthusiasm for radiation for reasonable reasons,
but for basically everybody, including these very hard no scientists
like the Kurries, there's this irrational obsession with it that
forms two Marie Curiy wrote about it. She would often

(15:45):
write about it as my beautiful radium and would discuss
kind of with this sort of awe her feeling at
the glow that pure radium have quote.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Oh it's a jerk off situation.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, oh it's hot to her. She's hot, she's hot
for radium. Right, those glee being seemed suspended in the
darkness and stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment. Right,
there's something magical about it. One US Surgeon General described
radium as reminding him of a mythological super being, while
an English physician described it as the unknown God. And again,

(16:16):
we're not doing nuclear ship right, nobody, that's crazy.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
It is.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
It is, I think, honestly, the best the best touch
point for for how people were talking about radium at
the turn of the century and radiation at the turn
of the century is like AI and shit, it's just this.
The discussions of it are often completely divorced from what
it can actually do because it just seems magic, you know, But.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
No one's out here like writing sonnets being like my
beautiful ais.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
And they're dog shit, Yeah, you're not wrong. So newspapers
reporting on early medical studies and a radium as a
cancer treatment published breathless reports with titles like radium is
restoring health to thousands. This is the last time we're
going to talk about radium that way. In nineteen oh four,

(17:08):
John McLeod, a physician at charing Cross Hospital in London,
developed radium applicators to treat internal cancers and showed evidence
that they shrank tumors. This is like, I think the
birth of kind of modern chemotherapy. Right, first, we're using
it to just kind of like shoot rays at sort
of external cancers and the like McLoud figures out and
I'm assuming this is horrifically crude, but like here is

(17:29):
how you deal with Like you basically use radium to
kill internal tumors in the earliest manner of like what
we are doing today more or less. Right, this was
treated as a go ahead by some in the medical
community and many mini grifters in the quack medicine industry
to start dumping radium into every conceivable product. Right we
know now, like, yeah, you have to be very careful

(17:51):
about how you introduce this stuff to the body to
treat internal tumors, because it's dangerous and it can potentially
be worse than the disease, or at least just as
bad as the disease if you're not careful about it.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, but people are just like, oh, asi is a
thing now, everything is si in it it argon oil,
argan oils now and everything.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
And they do treat it exactly like people fucking treat
a saie berries right where they're like, well, if it's
good in your body to kill cancer, it must just
be good to like microdose, right, like mushrooms. Right, we
just hear radiation all the time, right, why will we
middle We'll go a long way. Yeah. If a lot
of it can help you when you're sick, a little

(18:30):
bit of it must keep you all well. Right, that
is is literally what a lot of and like that is.
That is an insane thing to think, although you have
to give them some credit. They just didn't know as
much back then, right, Like I'm never.

Speaker 4 (18:42):
Clowning like all of us are stupid too.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah yeah, yeah, they were as dumb as we are,
just exactly you know about different things, Like we just
don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
Yet what we've been extremely stupid about.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, I mean I still think we're
gonna find out that like a lot of the stuff
in our SODA's is the worst thing ever. They're going
to talk about some of that, but also maybe not.
It'll probably just be you know, all of the all
of the fucking gasoline fumes in the air.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
But like literally they were like, hey, Lacroix made of
like fucked up stuff, and everyone was like cheers and
popped another fucking six pack, like no one cares, no cares.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
I mean, I'm drinking fucking it says it's brewed with
real tea and lemon, but it's one of those nonsense
bubbly waters. Who knows what kind of poison is in
this fucking thing.

Speaker 4 (19:27):
No one trust anything, and we're just selling slowly dying.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
That's it it is.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
I do love it whenever, Like my friends that I
spent ten years doing drugs with get like on a
health kick and are like, no, I'm not going to
drink that diet soda because it's got this And it's like, man,
I know what we snorted together, right, Like You're like
that cocaine smelled like a fucking gas station. Okay, I
seen you smoke.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
Whatever you found no cushions of the couch. Now we care.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
About aspect whatever. Eric, I watched you pick up a
half smoked cigarette from outside a bar and lighted because
you were that drunk, Like, don't don't talk to me
about fucking ASPI dade.

Speaker 4 (20:08):
Yeah, and you lit the filter, dog, Yeah, yeah, you just.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Turn it on the filter. So people are getting real
excited about radiation and the seemingly magical properties of radium
were reinforced by a series of discoveries around the turn
of the century. And this I wouldn't have guessed into
the healing properties of hot springs. Now. If you like
spending a lot of time reading Victorian novels, right, there's
basically always a character who gets sick and has to

(20:33):
take to the spa town to like take in the vapors, right,
taking the waters and shit right like that goes.

Speaker 4 (20:39):
That's a tringle convalesce always, yeah, And.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
I think probably for as long as there's been civilization,
people have known while I felt better once I got
in that hot spring, it's probably good for me. And
it is actually for pretty basic reasons, right, For what
soaking in hot water can be really healthy for your
joints and your muscles.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
It can be no pain, better than just odds bring
Robert is a hot tub with Yeah, well no, what
if we combine two of our favorite things?

Speaker 2 (21:07):
Yeah, well, actually this is weird. What they find is
that those things have always been combined, right, So they're
they're trying to figure out and hot springs have always
been together. Yeah, yeah, that is a property. I'm gonna
explain this. It actually makes a lot of sense. I
just had never thought about this before. So, you know,

(21:28):
there's this folk belief that has some backing in it
that like hot springs are good for your body, right,
And they didn't really know why. And so they start
at the same time as they're discovering, you know, that
radiation is the thing, how it works, They're start being
scientists who are trying to figure out, like, what is
it about hot springs that have healing properties? And I'm

(21:50):
gonna I want to read from a write up on
radium patent medications in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Here this is talking about researcher studying hot springs. They
noted throughout history, hot springs like those at Brombach in Germany,
Iseshia in Italy, and Saldebane in France had been touted
as panaceas for a variety of ailments, including rheumatism, cretonism, impotence,
and melancholy. These salutary effects were achieved only when the

(22:13):
waters were drunk or their vapors deeply inhaled. Bottled water
from these springs rapidly lost its potency. The great German
chemists Eustus von Leibig attempted to analyze the waters from
Gostein Springs, eventually ascribing their power to a dissolved gas
with mysterious electrical effects. In nineteen oh three, the discovery
was made that the apparent pharmacological agent in these waters
was rayd on radium emanation, an alpha particle emitting gas

(22:37):
with a half life of less than four days that
was produced by decaying radium. Alpha particle emitting isotopes taken
internally and minute quantities were hailed as powerful natural elixirs
capable of delivering direct energy transfusions to depleted organs. So
I have a basement, right, This is not the case
everywhere that their abasements. I really didn't think.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
Your transition from that quote was going to be so
I have a basement.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
It's relevant because in the Northwest at least, and I've
only ever had a basement here in Texas. We don't
have basements because of the ground's weird. But I had
to get I was told like, basically, hey, your basement
has not had radon mitigation, so it will fill up
with a radioactive gas and you will get horrible lung
cancer if you spend a lot of time in your
basement unless you install what's called a radon mitigation system,

(23:22):
which basically is a pump that pumps the air regularly
up out so it can rise into the sky. But
it's just that, like, because of decaying radium in the earth,
the dirt is filled with radon, right, that gets in things.
So if you have a basement, it will fill with radon.
And these hot springs because they're being fed from like underwater,

(23:44):
you know, rivers or pumps or whatever fill like also
have radon in them. Now, the radon is not causing
the health benefits, right, that's just because it's nice to
be in hot water. It's good, it's relaxing, it's good
if you're muscles and joints. But they're starting to realize
there are health benefits to radiation, and they realize that
a lot of hot springs have natural rate on gas,

(24:06):
and they're like, the radon is what makes springs good
for you. So clearly if we just dose people with radon,
it will make them healthier, right, is.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
The danger correlation? Yeah, being you know, causation, it's not.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, that's also there, but that's not yeah yeah, And
that's what like they decide is like, oh, it must
be the radon that makes the hot springs good for you.
Everyone should start taking as much rate on as they
fucking could. So this is this is going to take
off very quickly in the early nineteen hundreds, and initially
it is not like radiation putting. Radiation in food and

(24:44):
medicine is not regulated, especially in the United States. Now
we had it, we had at this point in nineteen
oh six, we passed the Pure Food and Drug Act. Right,
We've done episodes on this. It was part a large
part of it was in reaction to like the fact
that milk kept killing entire city's worth of babies when
it would be full of worms or whatever raid on.

(25:04):
Though radium was not regulated under the Pure Food and
Drug Act because it's a natural element, which is still
this is still a problem with like supplements today where
they're like, you can make a lot of bullshit claims
and like sell people. Alex Jones says, all these sells,
all these nonsense supplements, and it's like, well, it's it's
a natural element. It's not a drug, so you can
you can basically do whatever as long as you avoid

(25:25):
a couple of easy pitfalls. This is how they're what's
this is how radium gets introduced to the American diet.
Is they're like, well, the FDA says it's it's it's natural,
so you can put as much of it as you
want in your milk.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
That's so wild. I didn't know about that natural pole
or whatever. The fuck. Yeah, it's like, well there's a
lot of poison found naturally too. Yeah, are we just
like chill with arsenic being just slowly?

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Just come into this story, Sophia, because we were for
a while. Yeah, shut the fuck up. So all of
these fraud treatments starts out into pages of newspaper and
magazine ads with bold claims like remarkable new radium cream
liniment drives out pain for making joints and muscles instantly. Right,

(26:11):
They're like, it's the radium in the hot spring. So
let's get rid of those healthy like hot waters and
just put pure radium on people's bones.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
I'm sorry, petition to make that voice your permanent voice.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Oh you're gonna be hearing a lot of that voice today, Sophia,
don't worry.

Speaker 4 (26:26):
I am delighted.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Yeah. So the reveal that so many healing springs gave
off raid on again, it doesn't mean that that's why,
like the good things like we don't spend time in
our basements as place as of healing just because they're
full of raid on. But dumb time, dumbass, old tiny people.
You know they're not as smart as you. And I
is right, you know we we smarter than this. We

(26:48):
would never do any We would never, for example, take
a cattle deworming medication because we believe it's going to
cure all of our sicknesses.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Yeah, and because a very tiny man they used to
host a show where they ORMs stills to do it.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Like and definitely abs one hundred percent. If if it
was like if podcasts had existed in nineteen oh six,
and so had Joe Rogan, he would have been he
would have been telling people to microdose radium. He would
have been, like, you're a dumbass. If you're not microdosing
straight radiation, you get it some rads every day.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
He would have been glowing.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Yeah, he would be yeah, nothing but elk meat and
fucking radium. So the name of the new therapy that
a lot of health grifters start pushing based on these
ideas is called mild radium therapy as opposed to like
what we're actually doing when we're treating cancer, which is
a much heavier dose right of this kind of stuff.
So mild radium therapy is basically we're microdosing this shit,

(27:44):
you know. Mild radiation therapy advocates weren't sure why this
stuff worked right. There were significant debates. Some suggested radium
compounds stimulated organs directly. Others believed the radiation acted as
superpowered bleach killing microscopic toxins that caused cancerous tumors. There
were theories that radium stimulated your adrenal glands or perhaps

(28:06):
the thyroid. What seemed clear beyond doubt was that the
healing properties of radium came from alpha particles emitted by
a radium nucleus. Now obviously Sophia Sophie all three of
us are trained nuclear physicists. We don't talk about it
much on the show, but you know, privately, all we
talk about is like thorium plants and shit. We're very

(28:26):
knowledgeable about this, but because our audience or a bunch
of dumb dums, I'm going to read a quote from
the AMA's journal explaining how this shit works rather than
try to do it myself. Alpha particles are large, relatively
slow moving chunks of nuclear matter consisting of two protons
and two neutrons. They possess tremendous energy and produce a
dense cloud of ionization events when traversing matter. Because they

(28:48):
dissipate their energy so rapidly, they can only penetrate forty
two one hundred um, limiting the range over which they
can exert their effects to a distance of about ten
cell diameters. Such a lack of penetration prevented their use
in cancer therapy, and the early radioactive source is produced
for curey therapy all contained filters designed to stop alpha
particle transmission. Though high doses of alpha radiation produced an

(29:10):
intense blistering response on the skin, alpha particles were considered
just too difficult to harness in the service of cancer treatment,
and we're largely ignored by oncologists. So, like, the basically
what this is saying is like the method of action
that like is being used in this mild therapy is
the stuff that once they oncology just started fucking around
with radiation, they realize this stuff is too hard to control,

(29:31):
so we're not going to use it for most things.
And then it becomes the province of medical grifters who
are like, we're going to use this for fucking everything. Now,
I mean I.

Speaker 4 (29:39):
Heard that, but really all I heard was not enough penetration.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Not enough penetration. That's that's right, that's right. This is
this is mild radiation therapy is basically getting deep dicked
by straight up radiation. Like that is what's going on
here now. To be fair to our old timey idiots,
by you know, early kind of the outbreak of World
War One that period, there are some studies that seem

(30:04):
to show real medical benefits to light radiation therapy. Now
these are all very flawed studies, but they led to
this belief that people could back up with what seemed
like good evidence that radium might treat rheumatism. Gout, syphilis, anemia, epilepsy,
multiple sclerosis, and white right. Yeah, ed well, yes, by

(30:26):
far the most common kind of radiation medication I've come
across our variations of dick bills. So yeah, we'll be
talking a lot about that.

Speaker 4 (30:34):
That's what the original jerkoff machines were for.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
Yeah, yeah, just like people think it's like there's that
whole whole thing that they think, like gynecologists used to
like jerk their patients off, which is like not a thing.
It was a thing invented for a.

Speaker 4 (30:50):
Movie that just spread.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
But originally the jerkoff machines were definitely were like, oh,
we're going to solve all these men's problems. If like
these jerk off machines them off, like obviously, we'll get
all the bad to come out through their jizz. Yeah,
that's doctoring one oh one.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah, get them a prostate poker that's like made out
of puer uranium. You know. That's actually that's actually more
or less where this ends up. One of the things
they did know that was shown pretty early on in
radiation research is that when you exposed like a portion
of someone's body to radioactive waves, their leukocytes, their white
blood cells would kind of cluster around where that beam

(31:30):
was hitting. I'm guessing this is just your immune system
trying to defend itself from something. But like they they
this kind of this led the assumption that if you
irradiate part of the body, it will bring the white
blood cells there. And the white blood cells those are
basically the worker bees of your immune system. So that's
part of what the logic here is. Is it clearly
this stimulates our immune system, which must mean if you're sick,

(31:53):
you kind of like X ray the part of you
that is suffering, and it'll bring the white blood cells
and they'll take care of the problem. That's one of
the reasons people think this works. That's not what's happening.
Police do not radiate your like elbow if you've got
tennis elbow, right, But that's what people think is going on.
Treatments like this take off like gangbusters among certain segments

(32:14):
of the medical community. One physician reported that from nineteen
thirteen to nineteen twenty one he dispensed over seven thousand
injections of radium, the over the counter trade in radium,
and he's again just shooting straight radiation into people's body.
When they're like sick or whatever. Yeah, so well, yeah,
the over the counter trade in radium based pharmaceutical remedies

(32:35):
was even more widespread. One of the most popular early
devices was inspired by the supposed benefits of radon hot springs,
The Revigator by R. W. Thomas. This was basically a
big crockpot type device that you poured your water in.
It has a spigot, and this is like how you
drink your water every day, Right, You pour it into
it's like a filter bottle. Right, but you know what

(32:56):
the bottle is made out of, Tell me pure uranium.
It is. It is a cistern of uranium that you
pour your water in, and you're supposed to drink six
or seven glasses of uranium water every day.

Speaker 4 (33:11):
Hey, I'm sorry, that's flawless.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yeah, it would have been a lot easier to make
like a backyard nuclear weapon back in the day. But
you know who will teach you how to make an
atomic bomb.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
Our sponsors, Yeah, next goods and Services providers.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
We are sponsored entirely by Doc Brown from the first
Back to the Future movie, and there's nothing he loves
more than giving people access to nuclear weapons. And we're
back so I want to read a quote from the

(33:50):
book Quackery by Lydia King and Nate Peterson next talking
about this uranium water dispensing system and if you had
any leftover water at the end of the day. Advertisements
encouraged consumers to water their plants. One of the problems
with the revigator, besides slowly poisoning people with about five
times the radium concentration recommended for drinking water, was its

(34:10):
lack of portability. Several similar, but smaller devices sprang onto
the market, including the Thomas Cone, the Zimmer Aminator, and
the Radium Aminator, all of which operated on a similar
principle that you simply PLoP them into water you were
about to drink. These devices, collectively dubbed eminators, were typically
manufactured from carnotite or a primary ore of uranium. The

(34:30):
uranium would gradually decompose, producing radium and radon gas in turn,
which then infuse the water to make it radioactive. So
you just dump in some uranium in your water to
take like a sip. You know that's what you need, right,
you know, just a little bit of uranium. It's good
for you.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Yeah, callie, Yes, don't disrespect it.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Thank you, oh man, Yeah, that it does sound and
one of the things that's weird. I haven't found a
good explanation of this, but a lot of people report
they feel better, they feel invigorated, they feel energized when
they start consuming this stuff, and a lot of that
is certainly has to be the placebo effect. I do
wonder if maybe like there's a physical just because of

(35:10):
it's doing shit like it. Maybe there's some sort of
weird high that comes from taking radiation in this way.
I don't know how you would like study or prove
that objectively, but a lot of people do seem to
report like, yeah, I felt like I had more energy.
Now all these people die horribly of cancer, like five
years later, but it does seem to make people very energetically.

Speaker 4 (35:28):
They pass like real pep.

Speaker 2 (35:31):
I haven't found like a solid explanation for this, but
there are enough reports that a lot of people seem
to experience and maybe it is all placebo, but it
seems like it's more consistent than you'd see for that.
I don't know, but it does seem like people experience
some like beneficial like they feel good on this stuff
for a while, So maybe there is some sort of

(35:51):
weird high you get when you're poisoning your body with radiation.
I don't know, but that is that is at least
how people report feeling when they're on this stuff right now.
If you're making health products in the early nineteen hundreds
and you really want to provide people with the maximum benefit,
of course, people barely drank water back then, right, it
was all high balls, you know, so if you want.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
Yeah, it's like it was like stupid people would make
fun of you if you drink water.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
Yeah, like you fucking dumb ass, square little bitch.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
So and they're talking to a baby who's trying to
literally drink milk out of its mother's teat.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah, they were just like.

Speaker 4 (36:28):
You were, dumb ass. Where's your fucking Manhattan?

Speaker 2 (36:32):
I do say that to babies often. But so, if
you want people to get enough radiation in the early
nineteen hundreds, water is not your best bet. Cigarettes are.
And so the good people at the a but Shari
Tobacco Company and bod in Germany started producing the world's
first radium laced cigarettes for when you really want to
give your lung cancer some chest hair, right like that

(36:54):
lung cancer is not doing enough on its own. You
gotta you gotta really puck fucking pump those numbers up.
That's some wookie lung cancer you got. Now, that is insane.
That is like one of the craziest things I've ever heard.
But the craziest thing is that, like, while these radium
cigarettes had a lot more radium than normal cigarettes, cigarettes

(37:14):
already have radium in them. Cigarettes actually have like more
radium than you would guess in them, Like all of
our cigarettes are to some extent radioactive. I did not
know this. I actually found this idea. Yeah, I'm going
to quote for an explanation. I'm going to quote from
an article on the EPA's website. Naturally occurring radium found
in the soil and from fertilizers can be taken up

(37:35):
by the roots of the tobacco plant. Radium radioactively decays
to release rate on gas, which then rises from the
soil around the plants. Rate on later decays into the
radioactive elements led to tin and polonium two ten. As
the plant grows, the rate on from fertilizer, along with
naturally occurring rate on decay products and surrounding soil and rocks,
cling to the sticky hairs on the bottom of the
tobacco leaves called trichomees. Rain does not wash them away.

(37:58):
Polonium two tin is an alpha emitter and carries the
most risks. Cigarettes made from this tobacco still contain these
radioactive elements. The radioactive particles settle in smokers lungs, where
they continue to build up as long as the person smokes.
Over time, the radiation can damage the lungs and can
contribute to lung cancer. And like one of the things
like radon heavy fertilizer is often used by the tobacco industry.

(38:20):
I think they from what I've read, it makes for
like bigger yields, And it is like research has found
that if you are smoking tobacco with lots of radon
in it, you are at a higher risk of lung
cancer than normal obviously the non smokers, but the normal smokers. Right,
it's like if you have two it's the same thing

(38:40):
if you're like getting exposed to rad on because you're
in like a basement that hasn't been mitigated. If you're
a non smoker, you are less likely to get cancer
from that than a smoker who was also exposed to radon,
Like the two the risks compound upon each other. Right,
I had no idea of that, but I guess cigarettes
are all radioactive, So that's cool.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
I'm literally used to like run a student organization in
college that, like a lot of what we did was
anti Philip Morris action. And I knew all this other
shit about them. Did not know this?

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, neither did I wild Yeah, so that's cool. All
of this brings me to the story of our actual
bastard for the episode, William John Aloysius Bailey. That is,
we have We do have a.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
Speca a name. I refuse to hate a name, a
man that has eloquishes in.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
His as I know, Aloish's fucking nonsense name, right, Like,
how fucking dare you so? Will Bailey born May fifth,
eighteen eighty four in Boston. We have woefully little about
his childhood or his early life. He seems to have
come from a working class background. Probably poor would be

(39:51):
a better way to describe it. One writer in Scientific
American described him as growing up in a tough neighborhood,
and he is a rough back ground. His dad, who
is a cook, dies when he's very young. He has
he is he dies when he he dies when will
is young. But he dies after having fathered nine children, right,

(40:11):
so he was getting it in he I couldn't have
been that old, right, so he must have just been
putting one out per years from the time he was
like sixty, you know. Yeah, yeah, putting in work, putting
in work. But this means that like his so, Will's
mom is always single, she doesn't remarry, So she is

(40:33):
on a single mother's salary fifteen bucks a week raising
nine kids. I know, and I looked it up. That's
about in modern terms, that's the equivalent of raising nine
children on two thousand dollars a month before taxes. Like,
I don't know how you do that. I have literally
no idea how you do that. That's like, that's a
fucking nightmare. Like that is, yeah, just horrifying to comprehend.

(40:57):
And and like you said before that before taxes. We
don't know. I haven't found much really about his mom
or about his background, but like, just from what we know,
she kind of sounds amazing, like she was she somehow
managed to pay for William to go to a private school.
Like it becomes clear that he's a really gifted kid.
She manages to pay she sends him to the Boston

(41:19):
Public Latin School, which is like the I think the
oldest public school, like private school, but public is in
anyone can go if they pay in the country, right,
So a very prestigious institution. It is the kind of
private school you send your precocious young boys to if
you want them if it basically like what it's it's
big reputation.

Speaker 4 (41:38):
It's a precocious young boys.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Yeah, if you're if you've got a gifted kid and
you want him to go to an Ivy League school,
but you don't have family money or like like legacy admissions,
that you send them here, and it like it specializes
in getting these kids ready for the Ivys. He does
really well. He graduates high school twelfth in his class,
and he and his mom basically have a goal of
getting him admitted to Harvard. He does not do great

(42:02):
on the entrance exam, particularly his science stuff is bad,
but he gets accepted anyway, and he enters Harvard as
a freshman in nineteen oh three. Again, we don't know
a lot about what was going through this dude's head
as a kid. From what we know about his background,
the poverty and struggle that his mom has to go through.
I think we can infer he grew up used to

(42:24):
being very poor and fucking hating it. Right, this guy's goal,
I want to go to Harvard. I want to like,
I want to make something of myself. I don't want
to be poor. I'm not going to do and like
whatever I have to do to make money is going
to be okay. Right, that's the uh, that's the conclusion
this guy comes to. And obviously while he's in college,
while he's sort of like starting to his formal education,

(42:49):
it's the same period that all of these discoveries about
radiation are happening. They're figuring out how you know about
raidum on in Hot Springs. The curies are doing a
lot of their work. So this is all kind of
a boom period both for public fascination and what seems
to be this miraculous new scientific discovery. And also the
early nineteen hundreds is the boom period of what's called
patent medication, which is basically random pills and elixirs that

(43:12):
could be claimed to do anything because the FDA didn't
really do a lot back then.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
That's what I'm saying, y'ah.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Snake oil, Yeah, yeah, he's he's coming of age in
the snake oil era. And while you know he's a
smart kid, his grades are good. At Harvard, he's always
struggling to afford to stay there. Right, And after about
three semesters of increasing financial difficulties, William Bailey has a realization,
which is, why do I want to finish college when

(43:40):
the really valuable thing is just having the degree. I've
been to Harvard enough that I can talk convincingly about it, right,
I can just drop out and lie. You know, it's
nineteen oh three, nobody's got the internet. Nobody's going to
be able to check up on me, right, I just
fake bloom. Yeah, you get all the benefits of glass.

Speaker 4 (43:57):
Fuck you Harvard. Yeah you can say did whatever?

Speaker 3 (44:00):
And O?

Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (44:01):
How are what are they calling Harvard?

Speaker 1 (44:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yeah, the Harvard CoP's gonna come after me. Fuck it.
I'll just lie exactly. So he moves to New York City.
He gets a job at an import export business, editing
their catalog, and he spends his free time scheming his
earliest plot. Now that he's in this import export he's
dealing with like international trade and stuff, he decides he
thinks he can convince the federal government to appoint him

(44:25):
to be the unofficial US trade ambassador to the Emperor
of China. Again, he's like twenty, that's that's kind of ambitious.
You know, I don't know hows are sky? Yeah, he
starts with a big one, and he decides to try
to do this. He spends hours, all of his free
time basically writing and sending letters to god knows like

(44:46):
huge numbers of US government officials, right, and he's just
like laying out, here's how I would modernize trade with China.
You know, here's what I'll do if you guys make
me this, which, like, again he doesn't know these people.
He has never visited China, he knows nothing about it.
This does not go anywhere, right, People do not buy
buy into making him the ambassador. So he gives this

(45:06):
scheme up and he starts traveling. He starts living on
the road basically just like going to different countries, lying
about his background, and you know, getting whatever job it
seems is going to get him the most money. This
kind of ends in nineteen fourteen when he is in
Russia working with the Tsar's government, like consulting on oil

(45:27):
drilling operations. He has absolutely no experience here. He does
not know what he's doing. But he's good at lying
to the czar. So you know, that's a useful sat
that will get you far, that will get you very
far for about more years.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
At this point, man, you will most likely get murdered.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, yeah, and then the Bolsheviks will kill you, yes, yeah.
But he's smarter than the czar because when the war
breaks out, you know, being a fairly observant person, you
get the feeling this guy understands people pretty well. He
decides quickly, Russia's not going to be safe much longer.
Heads right on back to the United States. He gets

(46:04):
a job working in a machine shop, and he would
claim in his letters.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
Now, at any point in history, if you make that proclamation,
you will be right.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Russia's Russia might not be safe anymore.
Always a good call, truly. So he decides, I'm gonna
you know, he's He gets back home and he starts
sending letters, you know, to his former classmates from Harvard,
all of whom are you know, in their upper class
careers and shit, and he just starts lying telling them
that he's invented patents for like motor vehicles, moving pictures,

(46:32):
armor plates. He starts claiming to have invented a magneto generator.
Don't fully know what that is. He's just kind of
like lying about.

Speaker 4 (46:40):
Elizabeth Holmes one point zero.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
Yeah, yes, yes, he very much is that kind of guy. Now,
what he's really doing is launching his career as a
con artist. He founds a company called the Carnegie Engineering Corporation.
He has enough knowledge about industry terms about like because
he's worked in sort of machine shops that he can
kind of fill out a convincing face business prospectus, and
he uses the name Carnegie because the Carnegie family are

(47:04):
like the most famous industrial dynasty in the country at
the time, so he just like sticks their name on
his business because he figures like, yeah, yeah, smart, he
knows what he's doing. And then he starts advertising, putting
up ads and papers being like, for just you know,
I'm selling a six hundred dollars mail order automobile and
you can do it on credit. So you spit, send

(47:25):
me a fifty dollars deposit, I'll ship you the automobile
and you'll pay it back later. Right wo seems like
a great deal, right, you know? You get a car
for fifty bucks. That's not bad. Back me up, Sign
me up. Of course, there was no factory and no
mail order carre. Yeah, he's just lying, but thousands of
Rubes send him their hard earned money and he makes up.

(47:47):
He makes a good amount of money off of this.

Speaker 4 (47:50):
Some of us are not Rubes.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
We just thought that that sounded like a really great deal,
and like that that car sounded awesome. So whatever catafor.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
He did kind of do a tesla where he's can't
pay me a little bit of money in front of it.
There's totally a car coming. You'll get your cyber trucks soon.
So according to the Journal of the American Medical Association quote,
the supposed factory turned out to be an abandoned sawmill
with one box of tools and three stenographers. This gets
found out when like he gets the ftc comes after him,

(48:19):
basically right, he gets arrested on December fourteenth of nineteen fifteen.
He's convicted of fraud, and he spends thirty days in jail.
Like most conmen in similar positions, getting caught and being
given a slap on the wrist merely convinced him to
be more careful next time. So we opt to go
for a real product, now not a product that works, right,

(48:40):
but an actual physical item his customers will receive so
that it's harder for them to complain to the FTC.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
He's like, what I've learned is I need to be
a better con artist? Thank you?

Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (48:51):
They really Shancarceration doesn't really fix no anything.

Speaker 2 (48:56):
No, I figured for a guy like this. I feel
the same thing about Elizabeth Holmes because I don't think
we're getting any safer by keeping her in a prison
for eleven years. You tattoo on their face con artist, right,
that that should mitigate the danger, Right, they can stay free.
Just everyone has to know that's a con artist whenever
they walk past, you know.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
I mean, at the very least, maybe attach it to
like every credit check, every whatever you should possibly on
the person, you know, because otherwise, like what, they're just
learning how to be better criminals in jail. It's like,
I'm not really I don't think they need the help.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
Yeah, or we have, like, you know, instead of using
the FBI for you know, entrapping random people at mosques,
we have a federal agent follow every con artist and
every conversation they have. They walk up afterwards and say
she's full of shit, like just absolutely full of shit,
like whatever she said to you, fucking lie, do not
give this person any money.

Speaker 4 (49:54):
That would be actually the sickest job.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
I think that might work. Actually, Yeah, like you.

Speaker 3 (49:59):
Just come with individual like interesting ways to tell the
person the same news. Yeah that that fucking person that
you're on detail whether or whatever for is like they're
con artists. But you just like, one time it'll be
a singing telegram, one time it'll be balloons, Like you'll
get a flash mob going, you'll do the robot like,
I don't know, you could just really go crazy.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
You couldn't. I think, you know how, there's always I'm
sure you have a few of these people in your life.
I do like certain people are just like inherently trustworthy
and like everyone likes them. Like you send out like
NFL scouts to the colleges and be like, hmmm, oh Chris,
everybody likes Chris. Everybody trusts Chris. Chris. You want a gig,
America needs you.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
Yeah, Chris is just saluting on his way.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
To But but Will Bailey has just learned how to
be a better conn artist. So the next product that
he picks is a patent medication called Lazzi Go like
Las Dashi dash Go. Lazzi Go for superb Manhood is
the full name of the product. And as you may
have guessed, it's a boner drug, right, And yeah, obviously
when you think boners, what chemical do you think?

Speaker 3 (51:07):
Radium?

Speaker 2 (51:08):
Oh? No, strychnine. Strychnine. He's not in the radium yet. Oh,
these are just strychnine boner dis Yeah, that's why basically
dick nine right, you know, that's what we call it
is because it's so fucking good for the bonus. Now,
giving people strict nine pills for erections seems dangerous and insane,

(51:29):
but it was also pretty common in patent medications of
the day. And I want to quote from an article
I found hosted by the Buckley Valley Museum, and this
is one such medicine from the Buckley Valley Museum's collection
is a bottle of Fellows compound syrup of hypho phosphts,
invented by James Fellows, a Saint John new Brunswick drug
merchant in the late eighteen hundreds. This remedy was widely
sold to doctors to dispense the patients, as well as

(51:50):
directly over the counter in pharmacies. Fellows's compound was considered
an excellent recuperative tonic that could be used as a
treatment for anemia, neurasthenia, bronchitis, influenza, pulmonary tuberculosis, and wasting
diseases of childhood. Like, oh yeah, your kid's not putting
on weight. Strict nine will help with that little bit
of stryct nine.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
You know, I'm sorry, wasting diseases of childhood. I'm gonna
get that as like a bumper sticker.

Speaker 4 (52:15):
Oh my god, don't hog at me. I'm suffering from
wasting diseases of childhood.

Speaker 3 (52:22):
Childhood.

Speaker 2 (52:23):
Now, if you're not a chemist, Strict nine is what
we put in rat poison, right, it is very toxic.
You should not ingest it, specifically, not in quantities. Despite
its potential toxicity, Fellows's compound was manufactured and sold throughout
the early nineteen hundreds. And what I found in that article, like,
because again they have like a bottle of this at

(52:44):
this museum, They're like our Fellows' compound bottle still contains
its original liquid, making it a somewhat hazardous artifact to
keep in our collection staff deal with this hazard by
wearing nylon gloves whenever they handle the bottle. So it's
still dangerous enough that you gotta wear ppe to hold this.
They were just selling it to kids who are coughing. Yeah,

(53:05):
that's cool. So alas for William, the law caught onto
his strict nine boner pill scheme and he was fined
two hundred dollars plus costs for yeah, selling drinking rat poison.

Speaker 4 (53:15):
That's just not enough.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Yeah, yeah, not enough, no not, And it doesn't stop him.
All it does is it makes him think, like, all right,
clearly there's good money to be made in selling people
dick pills, and you know, I am Also he's also
getting increasingly interested in like, people are really obsessed with
the indocrine system in this period, we're just starting to
understand what it is. So he's like, I bet all
problems are caused by issues of the indocrine system. I

(53:38):
wonder I want to sell ways people can boost their
indocrine function, you know. Now he's also aware that a
lot of radium based patent medications are being released, and
he's like, that seems like the fucking business to be in.
Speaking of the business to be in whatever business is
sponsoring our podcast is the business to be in love it.

(54:09):
We're back. So at the turn of the decade nineteen twenty,
radiation therapy was still At this point, it's a bigger
market in Europe than it is in the US because
Europe is where a lot of radiation research starts, and
over in Europe can get radioactive candies that are like
adverts like it'll make your teeth glow, which is great. Shit,
oh my god, fun.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
I'm just picturing those Instagram ads, you know. Yeah, yeah,
they're always just like selling the teeth whitening shit.

Speaker 2 (54:35):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean that is exactly like how
they're kind of marketing it, right. They're selling you know, liniments, potions, gadgets,
a lot of different wild shit. But the tipping point
for US based radium medication therapy is a tour of
the States that Marie Curie takes in nineteen twenty one. Now,
obviously Curi's a real scientist. I don't think she's a

(54:57):
bad person. She's not trying to ignite like a scam
medicine radiation industry.

Speaker 4 (55:02):
You're opening was She's a real person.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
I don't think she's a bad she's real sorry, real scientist.
So she starts writing. She basically does this big tour
of the US where she's like writing on a train
and like giving speeches all over the place that he
stops about like all of the potential that these different
radioactive compounds and elements have in medicine, a whole bunch
of other things. Right, this is the birth of like

(55:27):
nuclear science basically. So she's she's talking a lot about
that kind of shit. She's very charismatic, she's well spoken,
and she gets people excited. Again. The hype is a
lot like the hype for you know, AI or whatever.
The problem with this and this isn't really her fault,
but because she's such a good hype woman, a lot
of dummies get convinced that radiation should belong in everything,

(55:49):
and grifters like will Bailey realized that like if I
slept just like how like there's like pepsi now that
says made with AI on the fucking bottle. Grifters realize like,
oh shit, if we just stick with this has radiation
in it, people will buy even more of this. They'll
pay a fucking premium. Now it's possible. William Bailey Metcuri
at some point. We don't actually know that, but he

(56:10):
was clearly inspired by her work, and his own dabbling
with radiation therapy escalates. Right after her nineteen twenty one tour,
Bailey produces and circulates a translation of Curie's groundbreaking nineteen
ten two volume book Treatise on Radioactivity, which is what
she got her second Nobel Prize for, and he establishes
a company associated Radium Chemists, Incorporated, which starts firing out

(56:33):
various radioactive medications. There was dax, a cough suppressant, claps,
an influenza treatment that profited off of the still present
terror of the recent nineteen eighteen pandemic, and then of
course arim which is marketed as a weight loss Here
this one might have worked because if you do I
radiate yourself enough, you will get skinny.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
I mean yeah, like the more flesh falls away from you,
fucking bones. Yeah, the skinner'll week he'll be not yoursto
literally on.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
Yeah. So at this point there's not a lot to
differentiate Bailey from all of the other grifters selling radium medications.
Right every quack doctor and professional poisoner is racing to
market new irradiated supplements.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
Hate it when I'm trying to scam and then everyone
is the same way.

Speaker 4 (57:21):
I want Tony the only scammers.

Speaker 2 (57:23):
Yeah. Tragic. Now this is a time of astonishing creativity
in the field of causing new and curable cancers. Perhaps
the most reckless example of this was the radium eclipse sprayer.
This is a pesticide gun that operates on the brilliant
principle of killing insects by irradiating absolutely everything in your
home and garden. One ad brag that it quickly kills

(57:45):
all flies, mosquitoes, roaches. It has no equal as a
cleanerough furniture, porcelain tile. It is harmless to humans and
easy to use. I don't know about that. Certainly not
harmless to humans, but yeah, it's basically just a radiation spray.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Home Products, a Denver based company, has the cunning plan
to combine animal gland supplements, which at the time are
being marketed by the likes of Bastard Plot alumni John Brinkley,
the Goatball Doctor. So basically this is like the liver
King shit where it's like organ meat is a super food.
They're mixing organ meat and radium to produce one of

(58:22):
the most Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
A perfect hot dog.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Two tastes too great together. They call their product Vita Radium,
and Home Products claimed it would help weak, discouraged men
bubble over with joyous fatality. So again, it's a dick pill, right,
you know now, I know what you want to know.
It's not a pill, Sophia, because I know what you're wondering.
How would you take a radiation in organ meat speedball? Right?

(58:47):
Because that's what this is. I'm going to quote from
the book Quackery here. I was not ready to learn this.
The men who had the unfortunate experience of taking Vita
radium certainly bubbled over with something. Because those radium supplements
were suppositor radium suppositories, the patients were literally putting radium
up their own asses. The women, however, had it worse.
In an effort to combat the eternal feminine problem of

(59:10):
sexual indifference, Home Products produced women's special suppositories. When inserted vaginally,
these radium suppositories were claimed to cure all manner of
sexual afflictions and once more, reinvigorate their sexual appetites. Your
wife doesn't want to fuck, shove some radium upper hoho ha.

Speaker 3 (59:28):
I, it's like already bad enough just being a woman
during that time, but now I also have to have
a fucking nuclear pussy.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
Oh yeah, you got a nucure vagina for sure.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
You know, like my uterinelining already sheds now, like the
rest of my internal organs will just shed right out
of my pussy. Yeah, that's that's cool for me.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
One of my ovaries popped right out and just started
walking around. The bills must be working in my hand.
So the praud. The primary issue with these different products,
outside of the fact that they're incredibly dangerous, was that
they're not cheap.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Radium is it's not common, right, it's rare and expensive,
and you know, so is like yeah, uranium or like
only the very wealthy can afford, for example, that full
uranium cistern for their family kitchen. So most people who
were selling, yeah, most purveyors of recreational radiation products were

(01:00:35):
either marketing them just to rich people they were like
premium products, or if they were affordable, it's because the
company led about the product being radioactive, which in this
case is a real good thing, you know, right, what
you want.

Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
Into something good?

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Yeah, but that's not how people see it at the time,
and I'm going to quote from the Journal of the
American Medical Association again. Pharmacope used from the nineteen twenties
listed dozens of patent medications that supposedly contain small amounts
of radioactive materials. Paradoxically, most of the governmental regulatory intervention
in the growing field of radiopharmaceutical nostrums was limited to
prosecuting patent medicine manufacturers who supposedly radioactive preparations were found

(01:01:15):
to give off only background levels of radiation. So the
FDID goes the FDA goes after people, but just because
they're not putting enough poison in the meds. This isn't
deadly enough. You're not going to give them any kind
of crazy cancer with this.

Speaker 4 (01:01:30):
Honey, expect this woman's pussy to them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
God, the FDA has one goal, and it's making sha
people continue to get new kinds of vaginal cancers.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
So on myself and becomes a literal tarnis I don't
we succeeded.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
So Bailey and some of his peers in the patent
medicine industry are disturbed. Bailey particularly is a real He
does seem to be a true believer in radiation, but
he radiates himself quite a bit. So he is frustrated
by like how many of these products are cons right,
and so he starts working on a solution to this problem,
an affordable economic way of exposing yourself to the equivalent

(01:02:11):
of several dozen X rays each morning. This is where
he would find his fortune and rack up his highest
body count. But we're going to talk about that in
part two. Sophia, Oh shit, hang in. Yeah, yeah, so
you got anything to plug before we roll out apart one?

Speaker 4 (01:02:28):
Yeah, thank you for asking.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
I have a new Patreon It's the Sophia a Lexandra Project.
So go to patreon dot com slash Sophia Alexandra and
there I will be posting writing and videos and other
really dope stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
So go there, face well, go there or be square,
you know. Thanks And obviously Sophia and I. You can
subscribe to the show ad free at cooler Zone Media. Also,
if you go to a cool Zone Health product dot com,
we're released of a new supplement line. You know, everything
you need to stay healthy, to stay energized. It's honestly, folks,

(01:03:08):
It's just a fifty to fifty mix of uranium dust
and cocaine. So you know, you'll have energy. You're gonna
get fascinating new cancers, cancers. We're working on some cancers
that people have never seen before. Doctors are very excited
about about our uranium cocaine.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
It gonna be frenzy of that part in what hot
American somewhere where they're like going into town and she's like, hey,
get me some lube for my pussy.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
Yeah, we've got an uranium loob. It's just just you
know what. You can either use it as lube for
sex or you can run a new clear reactor off
of it. It works for both. No longer will you
have to go two different places for that.

Speaker 4 (01:03:51):
Get you a girl who can do both, I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Listeners often ask me like, what would happen if I
didn't interrupt Robert during one of those things? And honeys now, you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
Know, yeah, it's not good. You're radium. We get it
straight from the source. I go to Chernobyl, I dig
up some Chernobyl dirt. I mix it with some fucking
you know, industrial horse lube. Bada bing baya boom. We're
good to go.

Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
Hey, I summer near Chernobyl when I was a kid,
So I just have it inside my body.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
Yeah, Robert throwing, throwing, throwing an eel give that promo code.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Yeah, we'll eel up a horse. We'll do it all, baby,
We'll do it all anyway. See you all Thursday.

Speaker 4 (01:04:32):
Don't listen to Robert Bye.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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