Medicine: Koch Concoction

The mechanics of medical propaganda came to light last week when Dr. John Augustus Hartwell, director of the New York Academy of Medicine, called one Alfred Fitz Roy Anderson a liar for saying that Dr. Hartwell was going to test the Koch cancer “cure.”

Dr. William Frederick Koch of Detroit announced in 1919 that he had invented ”a synthetic chemical compound of very definite molecular arrangement” which cured cancer. He refused to describe the stuff. Doctors branded him a quack. People whom he claimed to have cured, doctors argued, either never had cancer or, as occasionally happens, recovered spontaneously. Dr. Koch argued that his critics were hostile because his chemical would curtail their profitable cancer business. He proceeded to establish a reputation among laymen, one of whom was Mr. Anderson, onetime railroader. Wartime civilian recruiter for the Army, onetime propagandizer for the Veterans’ Bureau, onetime anti-Prohibition crusader.

Mr. Anderson went among his rich socialite friends at Palm Beach and Bar Harbor and discovered the existence of a Research Investigation Committee. Members include John D. Rockefeller’s granddaughter, Mrs. Elisha Dyer Hubbard, and Consuelo Vanderbilt’s father-in-law, Sydney J. Smith. They helped to fill editorial wastebaskets with querulous complaints about Dr. Koch’s “persecutions.”

Last summer at Bar Harbor, Mr. Anderson began writing letters to editors and to such wealthy, influential individuals as George Woodward Wickersham, George Wharton Pepper, Harry Harkness Flagler, Bishops William Thomas Manning and Ernest Milore Stires. To Mr. Flagler. he wrote: “Dr. Hartwell has promised us one thousand cases of cancer to be placed in various hospitals. In addition to this we are almost certain of the support of one of the foundations. All I can do is to sing ‘Glory on the Glory Road’.”

Then, realizing that he ought to have some warrant for such a statement, he had doctor friends ask Dr. Hartwell for an opinion. Dr. Hartwell replied as follows: “Until Dr. Koch will make the formula of his treatment available to the general medical profession and will furnish enough of the material to have it given a thorough trial in several hospitals where its results can be observed by men competent in the field of cancer, I shall continue to advise those who ask my advice not to submit to the Koch cancer cure or advance its interests financially or otherwise. If Dr. Koch will meet these conditions I will use my good offices to see that the material is tried in enough hospitals to test its real worth.”

By now the medical air was thick with rumors that Dr. Hartwell was already using his “good offices” in behalf of the Koch concoction. To overtake and down such rumors, that able Academy director sat down last week and wrote to every editor he knew: “May I emphatically deny . . . that I have become interested in Dr. Koch’s cancer cure, and that I have promised to aid in having a demonstration of Dr. Koch’s cancer serum made on 1,000 cancer sufferers? These statements are entirely without foundation, and whoever is propagating them is doing gross violence to the truth.”