I don't advise resort to alchemy
Jul. 13th, 2026 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](/makepkg/implementing-https-www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinI do wonder, given the way people think that there is some Natural Way Of Childbirth that awful modern life has overridden and they need to get back to (yes, screaming), whether there is a similar kind of myth about the potent sperm of Men In The Past?
‘Spermageddon’: is the world facing a male reproductive crisis?
It's not just thinking of the levels of various kinds of STIs swilling around, it's the effects of all sorts of other diseases (MUMPS, for instance), and if you are going to going WO WO about chemicals and pollution, I think you might give some thought to the kinds of exposure to chemicals going on in unregulated workplaces, the pollution that generated the Smoke Abatement Society in 1890s, all of which we feel probably had some effect on the male reproductive system even before they started chugging those remedies full of arsenic, strychnine, etc, to boost their manliness.
Fifty springs are little room to make a definitive argument about changes in male reproductivity.
And on boosting MANLINESS, I was thoroughly boggled at this guy who was actually injecting GOLD, which honestly sounds like Ye Olde Alchemy, no?
Though those of us who read The Nun's Story may recall that she was given gold treatment for her TB, but it was very carefully managed.
I also read a murder mystery once in which the method was poisoning by gold (I think actually by some doc or pharmacist's leftover vials from that era) by an author who had form for unusual mostly poison methods (and not a lot of human interest).
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Date: 2026-07-13 03:11 pm (UTC)Even Healthier And More Manly
all that radium made him sick, and he decided that he was sick because he wasn't taking enough radium
he died from the radium eventually
and was buried in a lead lined coffin.
"In 1927, Byers injured his arm falling from a railway sleeping berth. For the persistent pain, a doctor suggested he take Radithor, a patent medicine manufactured by William J. A. Bailey.
Bailey was a Harvard University dropout who falsely claimed to be a doctor of medicine and had become rich from the sale of Radithor, a solution of radium in water which he claimed stimulated the endocrine system. He offered physicians a 1/6 kickback on each dose prescribed.
Byers began taking several doses of Radithor per day, believing it gave him a "toned-up feeling", but stopped in October 1930 (after taking some 1400 doses) when that effect faded. He lost weight and had 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."
His death on March 31, 1932, was attributed to radium poisoning. Radium is known to emit alpha, beta, and gamma radiation.
While alpha radiation has low penetrating ability and typically does not present a danger, ingestion of radium in the form of Radithor allowed accumulation in the bones.
Without shielding provided by the skin, the highly ionizing alpha radiation was able to cause localized cell damage on an extreme level, and this is ultimately what led to Byers's cancer and death.
He is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a lead-lined coffin."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers
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Date: 2026-07-13 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
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