I started wondering this yeasterday whilst watching Star Trek TNG, where Data walked into a village with no memory prior to an incident with a container full of radioactive material and people touching the material started getting radiation poisoning and nobody knew the cause of their illnesses.
Absolutely. The use of uranium pottery glaze goes back centuries before we knew what radioactivity was. However, the radioactivity of natural U is paltry in terms of biological effects. Chemical toxicity is far more of a threat for U in this form.
Miners, however, have dealt with the health effects of radon since the 1200s. In the Joachimsthal area, the accumulation of Rn in deep mines caused catastrophic lung disease in a large fraction of miners. This is well-documented, and the specific type of lung cancer found in these miners continues to occur today in poorly ventilated, U-rich areas.
Sources: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajim.4700230212/abstract http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2651614/