Before the discovery of radiation, were there ever accounts of people finding/being affected by radioactive material?

by Sam_R_K
restricteddata

The answer is basically no, except for observations by the late-19th century that people who worked in uranium mines had higher lung cancer rates than those who did not. I talked about this a bit more in a previous answer. There are just not any sources of natural radiation in the environment that make their effects really obviously known on human beings without very careful study. Radiation sickness and things like that require radiation levels far beyond what one would run into naturally.