William Bailey: Radioactive Snake Oil Salesman
About this episode
The turn of the 20th century was a wild and weird time, especially in medicine. New discoveries of radioactive elements created a medical craze with companies putting now-known poisonous substances in medicines with unproven promises to cure everything from arthritis to impotence. Unfortunately, the only thing these medicines did for people...was eventually kill them. And nobody poisoned more people and pushed more toxic cure-alls than one Dr. William Bailey, a Harvard dropout who wanted to make it big.
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