Talk:Eben Byers

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His funeral[edit]

Just out of morbid curiosity, how was his funeral handled? Smerdis of Tlön 14:04, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I'd say closed casket.66.41.66.213 (talk) 01:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Radium Poisoning[edit]

According to this article, Byers has been marketing and personally consuming a lot of "Radithor" water containing approximately 2 microcurie of Radium per portion, three times a day. Byers disease and death raised public concerns about safety of radioactive waters consumption. However the theory of radium poisoning seems to be disproved. Apparently Byers died from blood diseases while no other patient that was consuming Radithor has ever suffered from anything similar. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.149.224.78 (talk) 12:49, 16 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Those claims were made by the very physician responsible; an explanation rather obviously concocted to protect his professional reputation. The article itself states "Radithor is one of the few radioactive quack cures that can be unambiguously linked to someone's death" and does not directly dispute any of the information in the main article. Danny Darko (talk) 16:16, 6 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Trivial mention[edit]

No place for this in the article, but I thought I'd mention that P. N. Elrod's novel Bloodlist mentions Byers' death obliquely in the sentence: Only four years ago there was a case of a Pittsburgh man who died horribly from ingesting a quack medicine containing radioactive salts. --Auric (talk) 14:22, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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WSJ headline[edit]

The Wall Street Journal ran a headline reading "The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off" after his death.

This is a lovely headline, but unfortunately the way it’s presented in the text is highly misleading (though not strictly wrong). The article in question is not, as the sentence makes it sound, contemporary, as is clear from the subtitle:

Cancer Researcher Unearths A Bizarre Tale of Medicine And Roaring '20s Society

and the text:

Nearly 20 years after Mr. Bailey’s death in 1949 of bladder cancer, medical researchers exhumed his remains.

as well as from the first reference given for the sentence, a 2003 blog post:

Years ago the Wall Street Journal recounted the grisly case under a particularly memorable headline: THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTIL HIS JAW CAME OFF.

The article refers to “a report in today's Journal of the American Medical Association” by Roger M. Macklis (third and fourth paragraph), which is probably either “Radithor and the Era of Mild Radium Therapy” (doi:10.1001/jama.1990.03450050072031) or “The Radiotoxicology of Radithor: Analysis of an Early Case of latrogenic Poisoning by a Radioactive Patent Medicine” (doi:10.1001/jama.1990.03450050077032), both published 1 August 1990 and authored by Roger M. Macklis (et al. in the case of the second article). An article from 1990 would indeed be able to report on a ca. 1969 exhumation, and may well be referred to as “years ago” in a 2003 blog post.

I don’t want to remove the mention of the headline altogether, but I can’t think of a good way to phrase it that avoids this false impression. Does anyone else have a good idea? (Radithor#History would also have to be updated.) —Galaktos (talk) 15:39, 1 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This has since been resolved, mainly at Special:Diff/986113168 and Special:Diff/810073340. Galaktos (talk) 23:22, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Gruesome photo?[edit]

There's an image of a gruesome nature: File:Eben Byers Without a Jaw.png.

Is it appropriate to include in the article? Chumpih ^t 20:37, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

1: Are we certain this is a real photograph of the subject of the article? and 2: Is it freely available for use? If both are true, then 3: Is the image appropriate or needed for use in the article? Ifrit (Talk) 17:45, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Ifrit It should be included in the article. It is indeed quite gruesome but if nothing else it does justice to his story. Mystman1 (talk) 17:35, 9 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Is the consensus amongst experts out there that the gruesome photo is not of Byers? Kingturtle = (talk) 22:56, 27 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]