AFTER he lost his first patient to cancer in 1891, William Coley was desperate to find an alternative treatment to offer next time, not just surgery and morphine.
That desire must have led the US surgeon to the first published account of "fever therapy" – treating cancer with pathogenic bacteria. It was an 1868 paper by the German physician Wilhelm Busch, describing how he had deliberately infected a neck sarcoma patient with dangerous bacteria. The infection almost killed her, but her huge tumour softened and shrank.
Though the surgeon did not invent fever therapy, he was the first to do it systematically. After some of the first people he tested it on died from the infection, he started to use heat-sterilised bacterial extracts, with good results. From 1895 until his death in 1936, Coley and his contemporaries treated hundreds of people with cancer by injecting them with pathogenic extracts. The ...
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