Medicine: Good Old Fluid

No one has more right to be vexed at the impudence of a San Bernardino Naturopath named Emerson B. Hartman than William Bradley Coley, mightily esteemed Manhattan cancer specialist. Naturopath Hartman advertises himself: ”CANCER SPECIALIST using the ANTITOXIN that has CURED the worst cancers known.” Although his “antitoxin” is the stuff which Dr. William Frederick Koch, a discredited Detroit physician, exploits, the specious idea behind it skulks in the shadow of the very real cures of certain kinds of bone cancer which Dr. Coley has been able to make with a toxin.

Medicine suspects any theory that germs cause cancer. Likewise Medicine is stubbornly skeptical of any theory that germs can be advantageously used to treat cancer. Dr. Coley invented his anti-cancer toxin, Coley’s Fluid, 40 years ago. It is a mixture of the toxins produced by the germ of erysipelas and a harmless germ called Bacillus prodigiosus which grows on food. Prodigiosus toxin fortifies the action of erysipelas toxin. Together they have cured an appreciable number of people dying of cancer, and together they have in numerous instances prevented the spread of cancer to remote parts of the victim’s body. Some patients whom Dr. Coley treated with the good old Fluid 40 years ago are still alive. Because indubitably Coley’s Fluid cured some people who were dying of this type of cancer, the righteous Doubting Thomases of the American Medical Association hesitantly approved it as a “New & Nonofficial Remedy” 24 years ago. Last week, with much less hesitancy, the A. M. A. reaffirmed its approval, advising in a three-column report and a two-column editorial in its Journal that Coley’s Fluid be used as a prophylactic in conjunction with surgery and in inoperable cancers “as a desperate attempt to combat the inevitable.” Dr. Coley is 72, and still in active practice. For 41 years he was attending surgeon in Manhattan’s Memorial Hospital. He has written extensively on cancer. He still believes that an invisible germ prepares the way for cancers of the bone. But he does not know just how his mixture of erysipelas and prodigiosus toxins counteracts any such germ. Nonetheless the fluid works. Not a cureall, it has proved effective in a large percentage of inoperable bone cancers. According to last week’s AMA Journal, Dr. Christian Jacobsen of Lübeck seems to have discovered that the Coley Fluid works because, like typhoid vaccine, it fortifies the entire body. Significant is the fact that few people who have cancer ever had typhoid, diphtheria or other infectious diseases which create a lifelong immunity.