Word: cancer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...University of Illinois' College of Medicine in Chicago this week, a gaunt, sallow-faced man, a sufferer from cancer of the throat, stepped into a basement room furnished only with an improvised table, a mirror and an awesome machine. Technicians arranged the cancer victim on the table while Dr. Roger A. Harvey peered through the strange machine's ring sights (like those on an aircraft machine gun) at the patient's neck. When the apparatus was aimed just right, the technicians left the room...
...perforated wallboard beyond his feet. But coursing through his neck, in invisible bursts 180 times a second, was a beam of X rays whipped up by the 25 million volts to a speed almost exactly equal to that of light. The beam was aimed at the center of the cancer...
...betatron's first patient, who is 72, had cancer of the larynx, rooted about an inch beneath the skin. It was bigger than a golf ball and was spreading to the lymph glands in his neck. He had spent hours at a time racked by uncontrollable coughing. His sense of taste was gone. And he was losing weight. The cancer was too far advanced to be operated on. Unchecked, it would grow until it killed him by strangulation...
High Hopes. If Radiologist Harvey's estimate is right, every day for the next two to three weeks more & more cancer cells in and around the patient's larynx will have their nuclei killed by the betatron's almost irresistible rays. Patients with deep-seated malignancies in other parts of the body also started treatment this week. Soon Dr. Harvey should be able to tell whether medicine's new weapon, which now costs $85,000, shows promise. If the answer is favorable, high-powered, penetrating X rays may be used in about 10% of cancer cases...
...sister machine at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon has been used experimentally to treat eight patients since February. Directors of the Canadian project are not yet ready to report results. * Patients with cancer so widespread as to be considered hopeless will not be treated with the betatron. Also, many common types of cancer cells do not yield to X-ray treatment...