“Today, flea markets are the only places where there is the remotest chance to obtain a radioactive device designed to purify the air, apply to the body, or add radon to drinking water,” wrote Paul Frame of Oak Ridge Associated Universities in an article on Radioactive Curative Devices and Spas from the late 80s.

It’s a fascinating article all-around, not least because there is a long history of trying to directly input energy into the body to ‘rejuvenate cells’ and such.

Civil War soldiers sat in petroleum seeps to ease their aching joints and drank crude, too, which acted as a mild “purgative.”

Turn-of-the-century Americans were far more likely to encounter electricity in “medical” form than as light in their own homes.

“The average citizen found that one of the first ‘practical’ uses of electricity was medical… Millions bought patent medicine cures or electrical disorders,” David Nye wrote in Electrifying America. “Edison patented one called Polyform in 1879, and sold it to promoters who kept it on the market for decades… By the middle 1890s magazines such as Popular Science Monthly carried articles asking ‘Is the Human Body a Storage Battery?’ So many believed the answer was yes that mass marketing of electrical devices became commercially attractive.”

So, it makes sense that the radioactive “cure” would have been commercialized along with the progressive revelation of atomic science. Sadly, last I checked there is no wind turbine patent medicine nor solar tonic. Perhaps we live in a more incredulous age, or maybe it’s just hard to bottle and sell the sun, no matter how necessary sunlight is for your health.

Images: 1. ORAU Radioactive Quack Cure Collection. 2. Vadscorner. 3. ORAU Radioactive Quack Cure Collection.