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THE DETECTION AND ESTIMATION OF RADIUM IN LIVING PERSONS. III. THE NORMAL ELIMINATION OF RADIUM. by Herman Schlundt, Professor of Chemistry, University of Missouri, Columbia. and G. Failla, Helf Memorial Hospital Newyork City The question of the normal elimination of radium by persons bearing minute quantities of radium fixed in the bony skeleton nature ally assumes importance in connection with any remedial treatment for radium poisoning. Evidently, since the radioactive changes mainly the expulsion of alpha particles, causing the physiological disturb- anoe can not be controlled, the objective of romedial measures must be to hasten the elimination of radium and its transformation products. The need of quantitative data expressing the absolute amounts of radio- active products normally eliminated in the exoreta is, of course, ob- vious. Our experiments were undertaken to this end; but this contrib- ution must be regarded merely as a beginning on the problem. The subjects for these experiments were two girls who had contracted radium poisoning during their employment as dial painters between the years 1917 to 1919. Neither of the girls has been exposed to radium in the meantime. The two girls, who after a lapse of nearly 12 years, are still radioactive, present cases of more than passing interest, inasmuch as they stand as striking examples of the tolerance of living persons for radium. The immediate object of our experiments was to determine the rate of olimination of radium by these subjects under normal diet and living conditions and thus to deduce for each subject a character istic individual constant which we may spoak of as an elimination factor, or coefficient of elimination. To this end we must know the total quantity of radium present in the subject, as well as the quantity eliminated day by day. The radium is contained in and is distributed fairly uniformly over