No ore is sufficiently radioactive to be capable of producing acute radiation sickness, as far as I'm aware. You could live on a giant mound of pitchblende for a month and not notice any unusual health effects.

So, let's stroll down the physics aisle for a while. The primary elements we're talking about are Thorium and Uranium. For both of over 99% of the naturally occurring isotopes have gigayear half-lives. The longer the half-life the lower the rate of decay, the lower the rate of decay the less radioactivity there is (from that decay, we'll get to the complications shortly). Now, natural uranium also contains U-235 with a half-life of about 700 million years, at a bit less than 1% while natural thorium contains Th-230 with a half-life of 75 thousand years at about 200 ppm. This means that both Thorium and Uranium in a pure form (metal or some refined oxide or other compound) aren't very dangerous. They are naturally radioactive, and if you slept next to a few metric tonnes of the stuff every single day you might have an incrementally higher risk of cancer, but you won't ever develop acute radiation sickness. Especially since the major type of radiation emitted is alpha radiation, which is not very penetrating.

The problem with naturally occurring uranium and thorium is that when they decay they aren't done decaying, they decay through a whole chain of "daughter isotopes", each with their own decay modes (and probabilities), types of radiation, and half-lives. If you leave a sample of uranium alone long enough it won't just be uranium, it'll be a complicated melange of isotopes. The production of these isotopes is still ultimately gated by the half-life of the parent isotopes, so you aren't going to get a spontaneous production of large amounts of short-lived (and thus dangerously radioactive) isotopes just from natural decay. However, these isotopes can be more dangerous than the parent isotopes, increasing the radioactive output of the bulk material (because the output comes from the entire chain and not just one step), and also increasing the types of radiation emitted, perhaps including more dangerous varieties.

For both uranium and thorium these decay chains add beta radiation (high energy electrons) as well as the dangerously radioactive radium and radon. Radium in its natural form is not terribly dangerous because it exists in very low abundance locked away inside uranium ores. Radon, however, is not just a gas but a noble gas, so it can pretty easily escape from rocks that contain uranium or thorium and bubble up to the surface, to be trapped inside spaces with low permiability. This can include caves as well as basements and sub-floors of buildings. However, again, natural radon exposure will generally only incrementally increase your risk of cancer, it won't produce acute radiation sickness, there's just not enough of it.

So, historically uranium has been sought after and used, going back for many hundreds of years. The naturally occurring oxides are fairly colorful and they have been used as pigments and for coloring glass and ceramics. As far as I'm aware, uranium ore was never processed into the metallic form until modern times. In any event, use of uranium in these ways may seem slightly on the ill-advisable side today, but even by modern standards of health and life-expectancy it's still down in the noise of risk factors, in an era of widespread disease, malnutrition, and a bevy of other toxic chemicals (lead, mercury, arsenic, etc.) it's not even worth thinking about. I don't believe thorium was ever used prior to its isolation and discovery as an element in the 1820s, though in the 1880s and after it was used as a mantle in gas lamps.

It's worth pointing out that after people discovered radioactivity and began separating out the vastly more radioactive radium from uranium ore it took something like a tonne of ore to produce 100 milligrams of radium chloride. And even when working with large amounts of radium it took decades for Marie Curie to die from the radiation exposure. And it took at least many months if not years for some of the "radium girls" to experience health effects from much higher levels of exposure to radium (often ingesting some of it by accident through the process of pointing their brushes with their mouths). Those examples show that even when you extract and concentrate the most radioactive portions of uranium ore you still end up with materials that take extended periods of time of very direct exposure to produce health effects, and you don't get radiation sickness symptoms.

All of which is to say that naturally occurring "radioactive ore" is actually a fairly subtle thing, that was only discovered to be interesting for its radioactivity in modern times, and nobody experienced acute radiation sickness prior to the modern age.