Cancer treatment in the 1950s.

DEFTLEFTHAND · 27-10-2018 12:52AM #1

I was reading Lauren Bacall's autobiography recently, great fan of that period of Hollywood .

Her husband the actor Humphrey Bogart contracted throut cancer in 1955. It started when he found it hard to swallow food, his 100 a day cigarette cough was also worse than usual. While filming 'The Harder They Fall' in that year his persistent cough would became a problem when shooting scenes.

He refused to go to a doctor until Jan 56 when Bacall forced him. He was then diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.

What they did then was unreal , he underwent mustard gas treatment , chemo and radio were available at the time but were not used . The mustard gas ravavaged him, it didn't work and he suffered terribly . They ended up entirely removing his oesophagus before he died in Jan 57 weighing 80 pounds.

How times have changed. My mother is battling cancer at the moment with great treatments. I just can't imagine if the likes of mustard gas was still considered.

ChunkyLover54 · 27-10-2018 12:54AM

Best wishes to your mother - I hope she makes a full recovery.

DEFTLEFTHAND · 27-10-2018 01:08AM

ChunkyLover54 wrote: »

Best wishes to your mother - I hope she makes a full recovery.

There won't be a recovery but her oncologist is hopeful than she live for yrs yet with treatment. It's a staving off process.

mikhail · 27-10-2018 01:11AM

There is an amazing book called The Emperor of All Maladies about the history of our understanding and treatment of cancer from 19th century chimney sweeps being diagnosed with "a suppuration of the blood" (lukemia) through increasingly radical surgury, early chemo, the drive for cancer research funding in the 50s (60s?) and on to modern genetically targeted approaches. It's a big book, but I can't recommend it enough.

JupiterKid · 27-10-2018 01:21AM

There have been astounding strides towards cancer treatment in the past 40 and especially 25 years. Until the 1960s a cancer diagnosis was essentially a death sentence. Even as recently as the 1980s half of all cancer patients died within a year or two of diagnosis. Today many if not most cancer patients are treated successfully.

OP I wish your mother well.

Ardent · 27-10-2018 01:31AM

With regards to previous comment -depends on the type of cancer and how advanced it is.

OP- Not even modern medicine could have saved Bogart at the point he finally went to the doctor.

DEFTLEFTHAND · 27-10-2018 01:40AM

Ardent wrote: »

With regards to previous comment -depends on the type of cancer and how advanced it is.

OP- Not even modern medicine could have saved Bogart at the point he finally went to the doctor.

That's true , he was at an extremely advanced stage while diagnosed, cancer had spread. He spent over a year refusing to go to a doctor.

Pallative care should have been recommended to him . They should never have tried to treat him.

They made him suffer something fierce.

Duckworth_Luas · 27-10-2018 01:40AM

I remember reading that, when entertaining guests after being diagonosed, Bogart still continued to meet his visators with a lit cigarette.

DEFTLEFTHAND · 27-10-2018 01:52AM

Duckworth_Luas wrote: »

I remember reading that, when entertaining guests after being diagonosed, Bogart still continued to meet his visators with a lit cigarette.

He switched from whiskeys to martinis because whiskey burnt his throut.

He steadfastly refused to give up his chain smoking until the end.

Wibbs · 27-10-2018 01:42PM

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

He steadfastly refused to give up his chain smoking until the end.

To be fair, at that stage giving up wouldn't have done a thing. The damage was done.

retro:electro · 27-10-2018 02:22PM

I don’t know how true it is but I heard recently that more people are now living with cancer than dying from it. There’s a massive cohort of people who are surviving with the disease and for many cancer is a part of their lives they’ll have to manage for the foreseeable. My mam was given a diagnosis four years ago and her oncologist told her if this was ten years ago there wouldn’t be much they could do to starve off the disease. Now she takes her medication every day and lives from scan to scan in the hope that the treatment is doing it’s job.
Cancer is no longer a dichotomy of life or death. There’s also a massive cohort in the middle who are living with it, and some managing their symptoms and have managed to stabilise their disease and get it to a place where they can live 10+ years. The advancement in cancer research in the last 20 years has been amazing.

wakka12 · 27-10-2018 07:00PM

Thread makes me happy

We are so lucky to have so many of the medical treatments we have available to us today

Atlantic Dawn · 27-10-2018 07:07PM

Smoking 100 a day would be some addiction, even timewise it would be hard to actually do.

One eyed Jack · 27-10-2018 07:14PM

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

I was reading Lauren Bacall's autobiography recently, great fan of that period of Hollywood .

Her husband the actor Humphrey Bogart contracted throut cancer in 1955. It started when he found it hard to swallow food, his 100 a day cigarette cough was also worse than usual. While filming 'The Harder They Fall' in that year his persistent cough would became a problem when shooting scenes.

He refused to go to a doctor until Jan 56 when Bacall forced him. He was then diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.

What they did then was unreal , he underwent mustard gas treatment , chemo and radio were available at the time but were not used . The mustard gas ravavaged him, it didn't work and he suffered terribly . They ended up entirely removing his oesophagus before he died in Jan 57 weighing 80 pounds.

How times have changed. My mother is battling cancer at the moment with great treatments. I just can't imagine if the likes of mustard gas was still considered.

I don’t know much about it, but was there any particular reason why mustard gas was chosen to be administered over chemo or radio treatments? It does kind of remind me of lobotomies which were a regular treatment at the time but are now no longer performed. Obviously we understand more now, but at the time I suppose for any different number of reasons they were arguably the most effective treatment for the particular conditions for which they were used as a treatment.

I’m kind of reminded of other treatments not specifically in relation to cancers which were once considered an effective treatment at the time, and today we would regard those treatments as barbaric. I have no doubt that some of the treatments we use in modern medicine today will at some point in the future be regarded as barbaric too, but they were simply what was regarded as the most effective form of treatment at the time.

Raging_Ninja · 27-10-2018 07:37PM

One eyed Jack wrote: »

I don’t know much about it, but was there any particular reason why mustard gas was chosen to be administered over chemo or radio treatments? It does kind of remind me of lobotomies which were a regular treatment at the time but are now no longer performed.

Lobotomies are still performed to remove damaged parts of the brain, and as a treatment for certain types of severe epilepsy.

As for mustard gas as treatment, it did have some effects against certain types of cancer:

During World War II, naval personnel who were exposed to mustard gas during military action were found to have toxic changes in the bone marrow cells that develop into blood cells. During that same period, the US Army was studying a number of chemicals related to mustard gas to develop more effective agents for war and also develop protective measures. In the course of that work, a compound called nitrogen mustard was studied and found to work against a cancer of the lymph nodes called lymphoma. This agent served as the model for a long series of similar but more effective agents (called alkylating agents) that killed rapidly growing cancer cells by damaging their DNA.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/history-of-cancer/cancer-treatment-chemo.html

Remember, this was a very early era of treatment and research and people were operating largely in the dark.

Corruptedmorals · 27-10-2018 08:10PM

Mustard gas, wow that's horrific.

Unfortunately children's cancer is not moving with the times at the same pace as adult cancer research. Some cancers that are specific to children are using the same drugs for chemo that were used decades ago. These cause immense amounts of secondary damage and are quite brutal. Some cancers such as neuroblastoma have an extreme mortality rate in the case of relapse with no treatment available in this country. I would love to see the likes of neuroblastoma , rhabdomyosarcoma and the rest get the same awareness and funding as breast cancer does.

SEPT 23 1989 · 27-10-2018 08:40PM

I hope things work out ok for your mother

Hopefully she can beat it

best of luck DEFTLEFTHAND

_Brian · 27-10-2018 08:57PM

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

I was reading Lauren Bacall's autobiography recently, great fan of that period of Hollywood .

Her husband the actor Humphrey Bogart contracted throut cancer in 1955. It started when he found it hard to swallow food, his 100 a day cigarette cough was also worse than usual. While filming 'The Harder They Fall' in that year his persistent cough would became a problem when shooting scenes.

He refused to go to a doctor until Jan 56 when Bacall forced him. He was then diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.

What they did then was unreal , he underwent mustard gas treatment , chemo and radio were available at the time but were not used . The mustard gas ravavaged him, it didn't work and he suffered terribly . They ended up entirely removing his oesophagus before he died in Jan 57 weighing 80 pounds.

How times have changed. My mother is battling cancer at the moment with great treatments. I just can't imagine if the likes of mustard gas was still considered.

Oh how times have changed.

Steve Jobbs shunned conventional medicine when he was diagnosed with cancer and instead went with some crack pot alternative gig. It didn’t work. He had a treatable form of cancer but ended his life by making a terrible decision.

Kuva · 27-10-2018 10:44PM

Some chemo drugs are still based on mustard gas, things haven't moved on.

Others ruin your heart or destroy your nerves, others will give you a secondary cancer due to damage caused.

Living with cancer for 10 years, why do some of you think this is good? You don't forget you have it, it's a sentence.

Theirs a couple of companies doing the targeted genetic stuff around the world now, treatment for your particular cancer and only you, few actual trials on the go, been delayed for years for a couple reasons.

One eyed Jack · 27-10-2018 10:55PM

_Brian wrote: »

Oh how times have changed.

Steve Jobbs shunned conventional medicine when he was diagnosed with cancer and instead went with some crack pot alternative gig. It didn’t work. He had a treatable form of cancer but ended his life by making a terrible decision.

That’s kinda why I asked about Humphrey Bogart and the mustard gas when radio and chemo were available treatments that he no doubt would have had the means and resources to have access to, same as Jobs who would have had access to the best medical and technological assistance of the time, yet chose what appears to have been the most illogical option.

Was it just a case of “Nope, I’m fine thanks, I don’t want to prolong this”?

retro:electro · 27-10-2018 11:00PM

Kuva wrote: »

Living with cancer for 10 years, why do some of you think this is good? You don't forget you have it, it's a sentence.

Obviously being cured outright is preferable, but that’s not always realistic. Being told it’s treatable but not curable is better than being told goodnight Irene there’s nothing we can do.

qo2cj1dsne8y4k · 27-10-2018 11:03PM

My dad ended up dying 10 months after his diagnosis with the treatment causing a tumor on his brain. He’d have lived a little longer without radiation.

banie01 · 27-10-2018 11:21PM

Mustard gas derivatives were the very 1st form of chemotherapy.
It's not that Bogart couldn't avail of better chemo options, it's that at the time his treatment was bleeding edge.

Even as late as the late 40s and early 50s medical consensus was that leukemia was untreatable and the pioneers in Chemo were ridiculed for even trying anything other than palliative care.

sullivlo · 28-10-2018 12:01AM

mikhail wrote: »

There is an amazing book called The Emperor of All Maladies about the history of our understanding and treatment of cancer from 19th century chimney sweeps being diagnosed with "a suppuration of the blood" (lukemia) through increasingly radical surgury, early chemo, the drive for cancer research funding in the 50s (60s?) and on to modern genetically targeted approaches. It's a big book, but I can't recommend it enough.

Can not recommend this book more highly. Great read.

tashiusclay · 29-10-2018 12:33AM

I hope we experience a time in the not too distant future, that we can look back at chemo treatment as a barbaric, agricultural treatment of this illness. Having your body pushed to the point of destruction with essentially a chemical bleach is disgusting, and needs to be rendered obsolete, years ago by now.

0lddog · 29-10-2018 11:36AM

On OPs topic of Lauren Bacall ( Please forgive this otherwise O/T post )

Her 'Desert Island Discs' ( actually some nice anecdotes )

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mxpg

El Tarangu · 29-10-2018 11:55AM

My mother died of a brain tumour 20 years ago. Ten years later, a friend of my Dad got a very similar brain tumour, and lived*
While I am sure that that my father's feelings of relief that his friend survived were somewhat tinged with sadness of the cosmic misfortune of his wife's illness occuring just on the wrong side of this advance in medicine, it's heartening that science keeps finding new and better treatments all the time.

*in fact he died quite recently, but he got another 10 years of a good standard of living from the treatment

griffin100 · 29-10-2018 04:24PM

tashiusclay wrote: »

I hope we experience a time in the not too distant future, that we can look back at chemo treatment as a barbaric, agricultural treatment of this illness. Having your body pushed to the point of destruction with essentially a chemical bleach is disgusting, and needs to be rendered obsolete, years ago by now.

What’s your alternative treatment?

29-10-2018 04:32PM

tashiusclay wrote: »

I hope we experience a time in the not too distant future, that we can look back at chemo treatment as a barbaric, agricultural treatment of this illness. Having your body pushed to the point of destruction with essentially a chemical bleach is disgusting, and needs to be rendered obsolete, years ago by now.

What a clueless post, i'm stunned people thanked it.

wakka12 · 29-10-2018 04:35PM

griffin100 wrote: »

What’s your alternative treatment?

Yeh exactly. If there was better ways to treat cancer, theyd do it

CrabRevolution · 29-10-2018 04:53PM

tashiusclay wrote: »

I hope we experience a time in the not too distant future, that we can look back at chemo treatment as a barbaric, agricultural treatment of this illness. Having your body pushed to the point of destruction with essentially a chemical bleach is disgusting, and needs to be rendered obsolete, years ago by now.

If you've a better treatment, please share it with us.

Cancer treatment in the 1950s.

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