You Bet Your Life Quotes

“JD was born in Poland in 1894. When he was eighteen years old, he immigrated to the United States, where he worked in a ball-bearing factory. In August 1940, a severe form of lymphoma invaded the entire right side of his neck. He could barely open his mouth, turn his head, swallow, or sleep. In February 1941, he was referred to the Yale Medical Center for radiation therapy. After two weeks of daily radiation, he improved. But the improvement was short-lived. By August 1942, he had trouble breathing, couldn’t eat, and had lost a substantial amount of weight. On August 27 at 10 a.m., JD became the first person in history to receive a medicine to treat cancer. Every day, for ten consecutive days, he received an injection of nitrogen mustard. After the fifth dose, his tumor regressed; finally, he was able to move his head and eat. One month later, however, his tumor came back, necessitating another three-day course of nitrogen mustard; again, the response was short-lived. So, he received a six-day course, without effect. On December 1, 1942, ninety-six days after he had received his first dose of nitrogen mustard, JD died. Because this was a covert operation run by the OSRD, the phrase “nitrogen mustard” never appeared in his medical chart. Instead, doctors referred to it as “substance X.” The first paper describing nitrogen mustard’s effects on cancer wasn’t published until 1946, four years after JD was treated. On October 6, 1946, the New York Times, under the headline “War Gases Tried in Cancer Therapy,” wrote, “The possibility that deadly blister gases prepared for wartime use may aid victims of cancer will be investigated by the Army Chemical Corps’ Medical Division.” Nitrogen mustard had provided the first ray of hope in the fight against cancer. The modern age of chemotherapy had begun.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Those who survived mustard-gas attacks later developed severe anemia, requiring monthly blood transfusions. They were also prone to recurrent, lingering, and sometimes fatal infections. In 1919, one year after World War I ended, two American pathologists, Helen and Edward Krumbhaar, performed autopsies on seventy-five soldiers who had been killed by mustard gas. They found that the gas depleted the bone marrow, where red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are made. They also found that lymph nodes, another source of white blood cells, had shrunk. The Krumbhaars published their findings in 1919. No one noticed. Specifically, no one recognized that if mustard gas could eliminate white blood cells and shrink lymph nodes, maybe it could also eliminate cancers of the bone marrow (leukemias) and cancers of the lymph nodes (lymphomas).”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Recently, scientists in the Netherlands unearthed an X-ray machine similar to those used in the early 1900s. They found that the amount of radiation emitted was 1,500 times greater than that to which patients are exposed today. Also, where exposure times in the early 1900s ranged from ten minutes to several hours, exposure times today are about twenty milliseconds (thousandths of a second). And, unlike the early days of X-ray technology, medical technicians now leave the room before turning on the machine. Between 1896 and 1930, tens of thousands of radiologists, technicians, and patients suffered burns, hair loss, and bone pain; thousands lost fingers, hands, and arms; and hundreds died from cancer.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Historian Bettyann Kevles describes a 1920 professional gathering of radiologists, where so many attendees were missing hands and fingers that when the chicken dinner was served no one could cut their meat.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“By the end of the year, X-ray burns were front-page news in virtually every prominent electrical, medical, and scientific journal. No one, however, paid a greater price than the men and women on the front lines of this new technology: radiologists and radiology technicians, most of whom saw themselves as noble warriors, “martyrs to science,” in their quest to save lives with X-rays. In November 1896, Walter Dodd, a founding father of radiology in the United States, suffered severe skin burns on both hands. Within five months, the pain was “beyond description” and his face and hands were visibly scalded. When the pain kept him awake at night, Dodd paced the floor of Massachusetts General Hospital with his hands held above his head. In July 1897, he received the first of fifty skin grafts, all of which failed. Bit by bit, his fingers were amputated. Dodd waited as long as he could before amputating his little finger because, as he said, “I needed something to oppose my thumb.” On August 3, 1905, at the age of forty-six, Elizabeth Fleischmann, the most experienced woman radiographer in the world, died from X-ray-induced cancer after a series of amputations. Fleischmann had gained international renown for her X-rays of soldiers in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. Upon her death, almost every major newspaper published eulogies about “America’s Joan of Arc.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Within five years of Röntgen’s invention, X-rays were considered essential for clinical care. In 1900, at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, 1.3 percent of all patients were X-rayed; by 1925, it was 25 percent. In 2009, a poll conducted by the Science Museum in London named the discovery of X-rays as more important than the discoveries of penicillin, computers, motorized cars, the telegraph, and the DNA double helix.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“On December 22, 1895, Röntgen brought his wife into the lab. This time, instead of using a sheet of paper coated with a fluorescent chemical, he used a glass photographic plate to capture the image permanently. He asked his wife to put her hand between the tube and the glass plate and to keep it there for fifteen minutes. When she saw the bones of her hand, as well as an outline of the signet ring on her finger, she screamed, “I have seen my own death!” This was the response to the world’s first permanent radiograph.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“James Young Simpson studied medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, graduating in 1832. By the mid-1840s, Simpson had climbed the ranks to become a professor of midwifery in Edinburgh, relieving the pain of childbirth with ether, like his American colleagues. But Simpson wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a more potent agent, one that was pleasant to inhale, worked quicker, and didn’t cause vomiting upon awakening. He settled on chloroform, a combination of hydrogen, carbon, and chlorine. On November 4, 1847, Simpson invited two of his assistants, James Duncan and George Keith, and some of his friends, including a Ms. Petrie, to a dinner party. When the dinner was over, he asked his guests to sniff a variety of volatile gases, including chloroform. Duncan and Keith immediately lost consciousness, falling under the table. Ms. Petrie also lost consciousness, but not before declaring, “I’m an angel! I’m an angel! Oh, I’m an angel!” The next day, without animal studies, clinical trials, or federal approval, Simpson administered chloroform to a woman during a particularly painful delivery. “I placed her under the influence of chloroform,” recalled Simpson, “by moistening half a teaspoon of the liquid onto a pocket handkerchief [and placing it] over her mouth and nostrils. The child was expelled in about twenty minutes. When she awoke, [the mother] observed to me that she had enjoyed a very comfortable sleep.” The parents were so elated that they named their daughter Anesthesia. On November 10, 1847, Simpson told a group of colleagues what he had done. Ten days later, he described his experience in a medical journal, claiming that chloroform was more potent and easier to administer than nitrous oxide, and quicker to induce unconsciousness and less flammable than ether. Now the entire medical world knew about it.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Before anesthesia, surgeons removed bladder stones, drained ovarian cysts, and amputated legs, but little else; they were rewarded for their speed more than their skill. A surgeon named Robert Liston, in an attempt to best his own speed record for amputating a leg, accidentally cut off one of his patient’s testicles and two of his assistant’s fingers.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“At the start of the AIDS epidemic, American boys with hemophilia lived as long as those without the disease. By the end of the 1980s, among the ten thousand American males with severe hemophilia, nine thousand were infected with HIV. By 1994, more than 25 percent of the American hemophiliac population had died from AIDS. Most were children and adolescents.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“In March 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General noted a growing incidence of jaundice (yellowing of the skin caused by liver disease) among US Army personnel stationed in California, England, Hawaii, Iceland, and Louisiana. All of those jaundiced had recently received a yellow fever vaccine, which, in addition to containing yellow fever vaccine virus, contained human serum as a stabilizing agent. On April 15, 1942, the surgeon general ordered that yellow fever vaccination be discontinued and that all existing lots be recalled and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, manufacturers made a yellow fever vaccine with water instead of serum, but it was too late. The serum used to stabilize the yellow fever vaccine had been obtained from nurses, medical students, and interns at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, several of whom had a history of jaundice and one of whom was actively infected at the time of the donation. By June 1942, fifty thousand US servicemen had been hospitalized with severe liver disease, and 150 had died from what would later be known as hepatitis B. Of the 141 lots of yellow fever vaccine provided to the army, seven were definitely contaminated. Among those who received one of those seven lots, 78 percent became infected. When the dust settled, 330,000 servicemen had been infected and one thousand had died. This was then and remains today one of the worst single-source outbreaks of a fatal infection ever recorded.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Landsteiner wasn’t finished. In 1919, he left Vienna and traveled to New York City to work at the Rockefeller Institute. While there, he took blood from rhesus monkeys and injected it into rabbits and guinea pigs, which allowed him to identify yet another protein on the surface of red blood cells called Rh (for rhesus monkey). This finding helped explain why some blood transfusions thought to have been with the right type of blood had still caused serious reactions. People with Rh negative blood can’t receive blood from someone who is Rh positive (about 85 percent of people are Rh positive). This is especially a problem during pregnancy when mothers who are Rh negative are carrying a baby who is Rh positive. The Rh-negative mother can react against her baby’s blood while the baby is still in the womb, with occasionally fatal results. This problem was so severe that until a solution could be found—inoculation of mothers with a product called RhoGAM—couples were prohibited by law to marry if the woman was Rh negative and the man was Rh positive.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

“Although the events surrounding the death of Antoine Mauroy remain somewhat cloudy, one thing was clear: Mauroy improved after his transfusions. How was this possible? In all likelihood, Mauroy’s psychosis was the result of a syphilis infection of his brain, which could account for all of his symptoms. One of the side effects of Mauroy’s transfusions was fever. It is now well established that the bacterium that causes syphilis (Treponema pallidum) is exquisitely sensitive to higher temperatures. Indeed, in 1927, Julius Wagner-Jauregg received a Nobel Prize for proving that syphilis could be treated with fever therapy, either by placing patients in a “fever cabinet” or by injecting them with malaria parasites before treating them with lifesaving quinine.”
― Paul A. Offit, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation