Read Online Death Be Not Proud by John J. Gunther - Free Book Online
Authors: John J. Gunther
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from Russia, to one specialist who was experimenting with radioactive phosphorus, to the head of Massachusetts General, and to our friend Professor Francis Bitter. We asked one and all the same question—did they know anything new? Was there any hope?—particularly in developments in medical physics. One and all made the same reply, in painstaking and courteous terms, that nothing at all was new, that Johnny was having the best and most expert medical care the entire world of science could provide, that no new discoveries at all had come in this field, and that, therefore, hope was nil.
One morning Frances found an item in the Sunday Times, hardly two inches long, describing some remarkable ameliorations of tumors—not brain tumors, but just tumors—caused by intravenous dosages of mustard gas.
This is, of course, a deadly poison. Scientists had come across it as a possible treatment of cancer directly out of military experiments. Mustard gas kills by attacking certain cells with abnormally fast growth. What is a tumor if not some-thing in the body growing fast? Hence the transposition was easy to the hypothesis that mustard, or HN as the doctors called it, might conceivably pick out and attack tumor cells, while not harming appreciably other cells, if administered in tiny doses with great care. Moreover the researchers had discovered that mustard had mysterious and extraordinary effects on various other elements in the body. It seemed just the sort of thing we had hoped the scientists would tell us about. None of my eminent correspondents had so much as mentioned it. But there it was plain as day in the New York Times.
Frances, through friends in New Haven, set out on the trail of this mustard. We chased it to the University of Utah, to an experimental station in Maine, and to the offices of the American Cancer Society. After a week we tracked it down finally at Memorial Hospital, New York City—ten minutes’ walk from our apartment. What decided us to use it was the word over the telephone of one of the most celebrated physicians in the United States: “I f it were my son, I’d try it.” And certainly there was nothing to lose. Nothing at all to lose!
Traeger got in touch with Rhoads, the head of Memorial, and I went to see Craver, the medical director there, who put at our disposal Dr. Joseph Burchenal, a young scientist with a fine war record who was in charge of the H N experiments. He drove out to Neurological with me, and we put it up to Mount. Now it is a ticklish business to mix up hospitals. It is a very rare thing for a doctor affixed to one hospital, like Burchenal at Memorial, to do work at another like Medical Center. Let me thank everybody who generously helped waive the rules. Within twenty-four hours of first talking to Craver at Memorial, I saw the first injection of mustard gas ever given at Medical Center administered to Johnny. It was all so impromptu and urgent that I myself carried the precious, frightfully poisonous stuff from one hospital to the other.
During all of this Johnny was reasonably confident. At I do not know what cost to his inner resources, he maintained the boldest kind of front. Once Bill Shirer and the late John T. Whitaker dropped in; each had just had a serious hospital experience. “What did you talk about?” I asked Johnny when they had gone. Reply: “It was very boresome. We discussed our operations.”
Frances gave him some science fiction once. “The trouble with science fiction,” Johnny said, “is that it’s bad fiction and no science.” He announced one morning that he wanted to be five things—a physicist, a chemist, a mathematician, a poet, and a cook. He added soberly, “And since I’m only six-teen, I think I have a good start in all.” Once he asked for a bath after dinner, took it, and later congratulated Frances on her self-restraint in not coming in to wash him!
She arrived at the hospital as usual at noon one day, and he wasn’t in his
One morning Frances found an item in the Sunday Times, hardly two inches long, describing some remarkable ameliorations of tumors—not brain tumors, but just tumors—caused by intravenous dosages of mustard gas.
This is, of course, a deadly poison. Scientists had come across it as a possible treatment of cancer directly out of military experiments. Mustard gas kills by attacking certain cells with abnormally fast growth. What is a tumor if not some-thing in the body growing fast? Hence the transposition was easy to the hypothesis that mustard, or HN as the doctors called it, might conceivably pick out and attack tumor cells, while not harming appreciably other cells, if administered in tiny doses with great care. Moreover the researchers had discovered that mustard had mysterious and extraordinary effects on various other elements in the body. It seemed just the sort of thing we had hoped the scientists would tell us about. None of my eminent correspondents had so much as mentioned it. But there it was plain as day in the New York Times.
Frances, through friends in New Haven, set out on the trail of this mustard. We chased it to the University of Utah, to an experimental station in Maine, and to the offices of the American Cancer Society. After a week we tracked it down finally at Memorial Hospital, New York City—ten minutes’ walk from our apartment. What decided us to use it was the word over the telephone of one of the most celebrated physicians in the United States: “I f it were my son, I’d try it.” And certainly there was nothing to lose. Nothing at all to lose!
Traeger got in touch with Rhoads, the head of Memorial, and I went to see Craver, the medical director there, who put at our disposal Dr. Joseph Burchenal, a young scientist with a fine war record who was in charge of the H N experiments. He drove out to Neurological with me, and we put it up to Mount. Now it is a ticklish business to mix up hospitals. It is a very rare thing for a doctor affixed to one hospital, like Burchenal at Memorial, to do work at another like Medical Center. Let me thank everybody who generously helped waive the rules. Within twenty-four hours of first talking to Craver at Memorial, I saw the first injection of mustard gas ever given at Medical Center administered to Johnny. It was all so impromptu and urgent that I myself carried the precious, frightfully poisonous stuff from one hospital to the other.
During all of this Johnny was reasonably confident. At I do not know what cost to his inner resources, he maintained the boldest kind of front. Once Bill Shirer and the late John T. Whitaker dropped in; each had just had a serious hospital experience. “What did you talk about?” I asked Johnny when they had gone. Reply: “It was very boresome. We discussed our operations.”
Frances gave him some science fiction once. “The trouble with science fiction,” Johnny said, “is that it’s bad fiction and no science.” He announced one morning that he wanted to be five things—a physicist, a chemist, a mathematician, a poet, and a cook. He added soberly, “And since I’m only six-teen, I think I have a good start in all.” Once he asked for a bath after dinner, took it, and later congratulated Frances on her self-restraint in not coming in to wash him!
She arrived at the hospital as usual at noon one day, and he wasn’t in his
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