Experimenting with Radium Therapy: In the Laboratory & the Clinic.

Abstract

In 1932 a leading American cancer specialist, physician Francis Carter Wood, addressed the New York Academy of Medicine about the state of cancer therapy and research.1 For the treatment of cancer, he said, surgery and radiation were the only effective options. Though considered effective, Wood spoke of the need for research aimed at improving the practices of both surgery and radiation therapy. He noted a particular need for animal experimentation conducted by scientists in laboratories since, as he stated, “human patients bearing cancer cannot be experimented upon. They must be given the best treatment known to science.”2 As Wood stood before his colleagues, he painted a picture in which cancer patients and the treatment they received benefitted from scientific experimentation, but were separate from it. On the contrary, the development of radium therapy as a cancer treatment in the United States from the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s reveals that physicians’ efforts to provide their patients with “the best treatment known to science” meant that patients were not, in fact, separate from scientific experimentation. Rather, as physicians worked with scientists – mostly physicists – to create technologically sophisticated cancer therapies, they blurred the practices of clinical therapy and scientific experimentation. As a result, patients became objects of study. They served as experimental subjects that helped advance a process through which physicians and physicists collaborated in an effort to establish radium therapy as an effective and scientific cancer treatment. The collaborative work of physicians and physicists also fuelled the development of biomedical science. While this paper draws attention to the dual role of cancer patients as both patients and subjects, its primary focus is on the relationship established between physicians and physicists. Physicians who sought to exploit the therapeutic value they believed existed in radium enlisted the help of physicists to