I am not a physician, medical professional, radiation specialist, or researcher.

This book is a historical examination of radium and its medical use during the early twentieth century.

It documents historical medical literature, physician reports, scientific publications, clinical observations, patents, advertisements, medical devices, radioactive waters, and contemporary claims concerning radium and radioactivity.

Nothing in this book constitutes medical advice, diagnosis, treatment recommendations, or an endorsement of radium exposure or radioactive products.

The purpose of this work is to document what physicians and researchers of the period investigated, what treatments they performed, what benefits they reported, what preparations they used, and how radium became one of the most remarkable substances in early twentieth-century medicine.

A historical claim is not automatically a modern medical fact. Throughout the book, an effort is made to distinguish between:

• documented medical use;

• reported clinical benefit;

• experimental treatment;

• contemporary medical theory;

• commercial claims;

• and later historical interpretation.

The reader should therefore understand this book as a history of medicine and science.

It is not a guide to obtaining, preparing, consuming, or applying radioactive substances.