11 thoughts on “02.0×117”

    1. no not really lots of doctors like to collect the antique tools of there trade conects em to the history

      esp Quakery theres BIG money in antique fake medical devices

  1. Oh my god! OH MY GOD! That is a real thing! Spike, you are the only other person I know of who knows about Radium water. I…I don’t know what to say. You reached a new plane of awesomeness in my eyes!

    1. Why would people not know about Radium water? It’s fantastic. Wow, all this historical medical stuff. Awesome.

    2. There’s a soda shop/old stuff store in Phoenix, and that last time I was there, in their “not for sale” cabinet, they had an old pharmacist’s heroin jar.

  2. isn’t that like… dangerous? and poisonous?
    or is that what they call “Heavy Water”??

    1. Yes, yes, and no. Radioactive quack medicine has the potential to be very bad for you, and heavy water is something different*.

      See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_jaw for the effects of drinking radium water. For a quick summary, here’s a headline from the Wall Street Journal: “The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off.”

      *The hydrogen atoms in heavy water contain much more deuterium (one proton, one neutron) than normal water, which contains mostly ordinary hydrogen atoms (one proton, no neutron).

  3. Hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium are all used in hydrogen bombs. Heavy water is Deut2O versus H2O, and I doubt anyone’s crazy enough to make tritium into a water.

    Not like anyone actually cares, just to prevent people from learning nuclear physics and chemistry the wrong way from alternate-history comics.

    1. It’s less ‘crazy enough’ and more ‘can’t’, for the tritium thing. The main use for deuterium nowadays is as coolant/moderator in nuclear reactors, which is why modern reactors can’t go all chernobyl (the moderator is needed to keep the reaction going, so if the coolant fails, the reaction stops. A very clever, very elegant safety mechanism.) Chernobyl used graphite rods, I believe.

  4. “Radium Water ” isn’t heavy water. There are some even now who say that certain low amounts of radioactivity is good for you. No evidence that it does. The CDC considered any amount to be harmful. But then they let us be irradiated by X-rays, positrons (antimatter electrons) and other such machines like CAT, NMRI and the like.

    Regular water is still used from rivers which is why nuclear reactors are in danger if the droughts in many areas persist. No coolant equals melt down.

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