Search every volume:

Volumes

1. Vol 1 The Bottles, Crocks, and Cases The radium tonics, water crocks, gold-plated pads, toothpaste, and cosmetics that put genuine radioactivity in the American medicine cabinet — what they were, how they were sold, and why they are the one deadly family in this collection.
2. Vol 2 The Physics and the Harm What radioactive decay actually is, why radium hunts the skeleton like calcium, and why 'energy equals vitality' was a lethal category error.
3. Vol 3 The Makers and the Radium Boom The salesmen who turned a lethal element into a consumer product — William J. A. Bailey and his Radithor and Radiendocrinator, R. W. Thomas and the Revigator crock, and the wider fad economy that put radium in tonics, toothpaste, and face cream.
4. Vol 4 The Reckoning How one wealthy man's jaw, roughly 1,400 bottles of radium water, a lead-lined coffin, and a still-radioactive corpse exhumed in 1965 ended the radium-tonic fad — and how the dial-painting Radium Girls, a separate and larger tragedy, first proved what swallowed radium does to bone.
5. Vol 5 Collecting Safely and Displaying Why surviving Radithor bottles, Revigator crocks, and Radiendocrinators are still radioactive a century on, what museum surveys of them actually read, and how collectors and institutions handle, display, and dispose of them — documented and cautionary, never instructional.