New York Cancer Hospital - Medical Innovation

Medical Innovation

During the hospital's inauguration, treatment for cancer was mostly palliative. The hospital offered what was considered the best treatments available for that time. Cancer treatment then meant, at best, easing pain and making the sufferer as comfortable as possible. Many patients came to the New York Cancer Hospital, in effect, to die, assuaged by morphine. Other forms of relief included carriage rides in Central Park and Sunday services in the hospital's Chapel of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, patron saint of the suffering.

From its beginnings, the NYCH seemed fraught with misfortune. Just months after laying the cornerstone to the new hospital, one of its primary benefactors, Elizabeth Hamilton Cullum, succumbed to uterine cancer. Coincidentally, John Jacob Astor's wife, Charlotte Augusta Astor also died of uterine cancer just a week shy of the hospital's grand opening in December 1887, missing her chance to be presumably cured. Due in part to his generous financial contributions to the facility, the New York Cancer Hospital's first wing was appropriately dedicated the "Astor Pavilion".

Inspired as much by modern medical theory as by 16th-century French châteaux, the architect Charles Haight's round towers were designed to deter germs and dirt from accumulating in sharp corners, which at the time was considered a harboring ground for disease. An air shaft ran vertically through the center of each tower to prevent air from stagnating in the wards. This design was considered the very latest in 19th-century ventilation technology: The New York Times commented in 1888 that "altogether, the features marked a new departure in hospital construction and make this admirable structure a model of its kind."

The 20th century brought new techniques in cancer treatment, including radiation therapy. In 1921, Marie Curie visited the New York Cancer Hospital, by then renamed the General Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases, to see the brick and steel vault where the hospital kept its four grams of radium—at the time the largest accumulation in the world. Dr. Edward H. Rogers, who was escorting her, assured The Times that there is no case on record of anyone being injured in health by radium. He denied that Curie had been harmed by the radioactive material, saying she had been ill recently only from anemia. In this period the hazards of radium were beginning to emerge, sparking defensive claims by its proponents. She died in 1934, unsurprisingly due to radium poisoning. In retrospect, early radiation treatments were often worse than the disease they were meant to cure. Radiation caused severe burns and, in some cases, additional cancers. New York Cancer Hospital may have been hailed a success for its good intentions, but there was no end to the suffering of those within. Plagued by the growing death rate, the NYCH had its own crematorium located in the basement of the facility, all the more dreadful by the vision, through its gothic windows, of the tall smokestack to the west of the main building.