Élisabeth de Demidoff

popular name: Hazel Kuser

date_of_death: December 9, 1924

age: 25

cause_of_death: Radium poisoning

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Hazel May Vincent Kuser was born on August 5, 1899, in Orange, Essex County, New Jersey. At the age of 16, she began working at the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, where she painted luminous watch dials using radium-based paint. This hazardous work led to her developing radium poisoning, a condition that caused severe health issues and contributed to her early death. She married Theodore C. Kuser, and they had one child together. Hazel passed away on December 9, 1924, at the age of 25, and was laid to rest at Rosedale Cemetery in Montclair, New Jersey. Her life and tragic death became part of the broader narrative of the Radium Girls, a group of 50+ female factory workers who suffered from radium poisoning due to unsafe working conditions.

popular name: Quinta Maggia McDonald

date_of_death: December 7, 1929

age: 29

cause_of_death: Radium sarcoma, industrial poisoning

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Quinta Maggia McDonald was the middle child of seven Maggia sisters; listed in order of age: Louise, Clara, Albina, Mollie, Quinta, Irma and Josephine. Children of Italian immigrants, Albina, Mollie, Quinta and Irma all worked in the radium-dial factory. Quinta was recruited to work at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey as a dial-painter. Like her sisters she would end up paying the price. The initial effects of radium seemed harmless, and the substance was popular amongst the younger girls in the factory. They would go home from a day of painting with their clothes glowing from the radium exposure. Some would even paint the buttons on their dresses or their nails, but the joy of the radium glow was short lived. Long-term radiation sickness symptoms soon became present among many of the women who worked with radium paint. Common issues included bone cancer, anemia, lesions, and sores. These problems were exhibited in Amelia Maggia, the first dial painter to die from radiation sickness. After Amelia's death, Quinta initially went to the doctor complaining of dental pain where her teeth began to just drop out of her mouth. Unlike her sister before her, she received a diagnoses of radium poisoning and was told there was no cure. Sometime later she noticed pain in her ankles, legs and hips and was put into plaster casts to keep her immobile in the chance this might bring some relieve. Upon her final hospitalization the doctors noticed a large sarcoma on her leg - the kind of bone tumor that killed a fellow Radium Girl a year before. She eventually lapsed into a coma and died at the age of 29 leaving behind two young children.

popular name: Eben Byers

date_of_death: March 31, 1932

age: 51

cause_of_death: Cancer due to excessive radiation exposure

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Eben Byers, popular Pittsburgh sportsman, socialite and industrialist, fell out of an upper berth in 1927 returning from a Yale-Harvard football game and injured his arm. His Pittsburgh physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Clinton Moyar, prescribed a patented drink called ''Radithor." Radithor, a popular and expensive mixture of radium 226 and radium 228 in distilled water, was advertised as an effective treatment for over 150 "endocrinologic" diseases, especially lassitude and sexual impotence. Over 400 000 bottles, each containing over 2 μCi (74 kBq) of radium, were marketed and sold worldwide between 1925 and 1930. Byers was drinking in excess of 3-4 bottles a day for years, claiming the elixir eased the arm pain and gave him a little energy boost. He enthusiastically recommended it to friends, sent them cases of it, even gave some to one of his horses. but stopped in October 1930 (after taking some 1400 doses) when that effect faded. Soon after he lost weight, had horrible headaches and his teeth began to fall out. In 1931, the Federal Trade Commission asked him to testify about his experience, but he was too sick to travel, so the commission sent a lawyer to take his statement at his home; the lawyer reported that Byers's "whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed" and that "All the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull." The death of the Pittsburgh millionaire sportsman Eben M. Byers, who was an avid Radithor user, by radium poisoning in 1932 brought an end to this era and prompted the development of regulatory controls for all radiopharmaceuticals. The grave of Eben Byers can be found at the historic Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.