Although we now know it causes serious illness, the supposed healing power of radiation from uranium was all the rage in Wisconsin 50 years ago, during the heyday of the Atomic Age.

That's when Lone Rock resident Kenneth Crook, a 36-year-old farmer with an eighth-grade education, opened his Uranium Tunnel in an old storefront. Crook 's tunnel was lined with pads filled with pulverized, low-grade uranium on which patients sat to absorb the purportedly healthful radiation.

He offered treatments for a dollar an hour, and within a fortnight of its opening in May 1954, Crook 's tunnel was crowded with the lame, the sick and the hypochondriacal. By mid-July it was running from 6 a.m. until midnight to accommodate up to 200 visitors a day.

One elderly patient was delighted with its effect on the arthritis in her shoulders, elbows, hips, knees and ankles. "A drug I 've been taking limbers me up, " she said, "but the tunnel helped my pain. It 's helped my kidneys and bowels too. I 'll probably need a great many more treatments. People get no help for years and years, and they 're ready to try anything. "

That, of course, was the secret to Crook 's success, which soon inspired imitators in 10 other Wisconsin counties.

Unfortunately for them, the state quickly charged him with practicing medicine without a license and the U.S. government halted his interstate shipment of uranium. Crook and his followers were shut down in 1955, before they caused widespread harm, and scientists soon learned that even low doses of radiation can cause cancer.

-- Wisconsin Historical Society
www.wisconsinhistory.org

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