Editor’s note: I am a disabled Vet. One of my disabilities is a slight memory disorder. I found an interesting article on the web to show our newsletter readers and wanted to link to a related article; this one, in fact. However, upon searching the site, I discovered that I’d never written this article. I had intended to write this article. I thought I’d written this article. Just never got around to it, I guess.

I should tell you that the article that I had intended to write (but didn’t) would have been a very different article than what you’re getting. This is because the internet has grown since I started the original research using just three books, three sources that I truly enjoyed reading back in the late nineties when the Internet was still young:

Morris Bealle is a top notch investigative reporter; Mullins is a conspiracy theorist (I like this type of person because their research is usually very thorough and I don’t have to go along with their conclusions), and as you can guess from his occupation, Dr Josephson was, like Dr Robert S. Mendelsohn, a medical heretic.

Having spent significant time on the internet, I’ve discovered that not only has Mullins’s book has been quoted by hundreds of sites, some have even lifted entire chapters right out and reprinted them.

Most interesting is that I have found “conflicting” accounts. There were none when all I had were those three sources. Now, instead of presenting you regurgitated “facts” from those sources, I am compelled to make a few judgment calls. I will present both sides, but I have to make the call here and if any reader thinks I’ve erred in my judgment, feel free to write: info@mnwelldir.org

The American Cancer Society began as the American Society for the Control of Cancer in 1913 [Organize to Fight Cancer, New York Times, June 10, 1913]. Since then it has become the “golden calf” of charities and its efforts to research and disseminate causes, and supply funding to find a cure have gone astray. Today it would seem its job is to rake in a lot of dough, protecting its supporters, and as many a critic has asked, why would they ever want to end this burgeoning money maker?

Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?

It all began when Dr Clement Cleveland, a distant relative of President Grover Cleveland, called a meeting to order in April of 1913. Attending were women of wealth and a handful of renowned physicians. [Rich Women Begin a War on Cancer. New York Times, Apr. 13, 1913.] The very next month a small group of doctors (delegates from medical societies associated with the Congress of Physicians and Surgeons) and lay people met at the Harvard Club in New York City. [To Extend Fight On Cancer, New York Times, May 23, 1913.]

Initial funding of The National Anticancer Association (its temporary name up until June of 1913), was close at hand considering the names of those involved. For instance, take the name of John E Parsons, one of the founding members of the Executive Committee. If you search the web for John Edwards Parsons (photo), you’ll learn he was a distinguished lawyer who began his career as the New York County Assistant District Attorney, was a founding member of the New York City Bar Association, and played a huge role in the prosecution of some of New York’s most corrupt judges. You’ll also learn that he successfully defended his client, the American Sugar Refining Company in an anti-trust suit, which netted him a huge chunk of change having saved his client from a loss upwards of $90 million dollars.

What you won’t find in Wikipedia is that he was the first president of the cancer hospital that would eventually become the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center [1884–1915, Past Presidents]. The hospital was initially built on land donated by the Rockefellers. Parson’s son, Herbert followed in his father’s footsteps as head of the hospital, and as an attorney he was a director of the Enterprise Development Corporation, an investment trust of heirs of William Rockefeller.

The Rockefellers were deeply involved in the medical monopoly, with John D Rockefeller Jr, providing much of the ASCC's initial funding. Two of Rockefellers' attorneys (one by the name of Herbert Parsons) stayed in the administration throughout the 1920s. J P Morgan too helped with funding. Dr Josephson tells us:

However, Josephson warns us:

He goes on to point out that the funds they’ve gathered have not been used for the “relief of cancer victims or for the payment of institutions for their care.”

The design of this new “charity” was based upon the same design of the American Medical Association, with a board of trustees (later a House of Delegates in the 1950s), and a Committee on Quackery. In the fifties, the word quackery would be dropped when the committee was renamed to the Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management. Josephson points out:

In contrast to Dr Josephson’s vituperation, I should point out that many people in the beginning were truly idealistic. They truly wanted to cure cancer and alleviate suffering. You’ll meet Dr Ewing soon and his benefactor Dr James Douglas (not a medical doctor). Many have entered medicine with the highest ideals; not all get corrupted by the system. But then, in October of 1937, the society boasted in its Bulletin:

In other words, the early idealism having faded, they had become the official cancer agency of the medical monopoly which would be their focus for years to come.

For the ASCC, the years spanning from 1913 to 1944 were their growth years in which they felt their way about. It wasn’t until 1945, after changing its name to the American Cancer Society, that it began really to grow and surpass all others, becoming one of the wealthiest charities in the world, which together with Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Medical Association formed our modern medical monopoly. After co-opting the FTC and FDA as their enforcement arm they’ve become the most powerful monopoly and lobby in the world, even to this day.

Personally, I find their early years extraordinarily interesting since this was when they established their roots and their methods which would evolve and define their true objectives. Ostensibly their original goal was “to disseminate knowledge concerning the symptoms, treatment and prevention of cancer, to investigate conditions under which cancer is found, and to compile statistics in regard thereto. . . .”

What they’ve become, well, that is the purpose of this paper.

First, however, we must try to grasp the state of the art of medicine at that time in dealing with cancer, before anything this nascent society planned or accomplished can be detailed or even understood.

In 1913, the odds of a patient living through a long cancer surgery approached 30%. Even today, doctors tell us that when you “go inside” there is always the odd chance that something will go wrong. But in 1913, your odds of survival for a “long” surgery were less than 1 in 3. Additionally, there were no tests for finding cancer, at least tests that were very accurate. Cancer cells, though recognizable under a microscope at the time, still didn’t exhibit enough evidence for one to be completely sure of a proper diagnosis. As far as treatment went, there were experimental drugs but no such thing as “cancer chemotherapy” (it wouldn’t be until sometime after World War I when it was discovered, by accident, that mustard gas appeared to kill off tumors; thus the first chemotherapy agent for cancer was derived from mustard gas), and there was surgery. Because of all the noise made by the Curies (“Radium was useful — magnificently useful.”), that they’d discovered a possible cancer cure (because it could eat flesh), radium therapy was introduced in Paris in 1898, and was soon after called "telecurie therapy." Memorial Hospital in New York City began using x-rays in 1902 and using radium in 1903. Interest in radium would grow making it the latest and greatest cancer “cure” that would sweep the world in the twenties, only to be discarded years later.

During 1913–1916 surgeons Howard Kelly (Baltimore) and H. H. Janeway (Memorial Hospital) began using radium and radon for the treatment of deep seated cancers. Their technique required placement of the sources several centimeters away from the skin surface. As this new concept, telecurie therapy, resulted in a significant decrease in dose rate, it was necessary for both surgeons to have several grams of radium, costing $180,000/gram, in their possession. Fortunately, Kelly and Janeway were the sole beneficiaries of a radium mining company, the National Radium Institute, from 1913 to 1916. With this unique American source of radium and with Europe otherwise preoccupied, these two American surgeons pioneered megavoltage telecurie therapy, using the 1.2 MeV gamma rays of “mass radium.”

© 2000 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10902549]

Telecurie therapy was named after Madame Curie; the tele meaning from a distance. Radium packs (also called, cannons or bombs) were placed a distance from the cancer. Later the term was dropped as doctors split open tumors and inserted the radium packs inside.

We do not have any figures on rates of cure, but as many have pointed out over and over, they were quite dismal. To most people cancer was a death sentence. However, if the cancer was reachable by surgery and still in stage one (not yet invading lymph nodes) survival was possible:

Today we look back flabbergasted that pioneers in radium were so overjoyed in their initial findings that radium would cause burns and blisters. Who’da thunk that from these observations patent medicine hucksters would invent the cure-all tonic: Radium Water?

One of the earliest entrepreneurs in radium was a mining mogul by the name of James Douglas. Born in Canada, he owned the largest copper mine in the world. According to Mullins, Dr James Douglas (a doctor of divinity) would self treat using radium until his death, which Mullins claims was radium related (aplastic anemia). However, we are in possession of a copy of James Douglas' death certificate, and below you will see that Mullins got another one wrong. 

Douglas began his adult life studying to be a Presbyterian minister, but was never ordained. In his own words: “When therefore I was licensed to teach, my faith in Christ was stronger but my faith in denominational Christianity was so weak that I could not sign the Confession of Faith and therefore was never ordained.” He then went on to study medicine while working as a librarian for at the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.

He was one of the youngest presidents of that society and gave numerous lectures to its members, on Egyptian hieroglyphics and mummies, and later on geological subjects, and finally mining.

It was mining that drew him away from medicine, and working with a Dr Thomas Sterry Hunt, patented the Hunt and Douglas process for extracting copper from copper ore. With no formal training in chemistry, he was chosen to fill the Chair of Chemistry at his hometown college from 1871 to 1874. His evening lectures, we are told, were among the most popular at that college.

Douglas’s interest in medicine returned when his daughter died of cancer. Having followed closely in his philanthropic father’s footsteps, the death of his daughter was a powerful influence on where he put his money. It was about this same time that radium was discovered in his copper mines in Arizona.

There seems to be two views of Dr James Douglas proffered by historians. They both see him as an intensely passionate and brilliant person, but where they differ is in his motives behind his philanthropy. One side feels he was altruistic, while the other side claims he gave so that he could reap still greater profits.

His philanthropy began by supporting one of his father’s causes, the Douglas Hospital in Montreal, originally called the Protestant Hospital for the Insane. It was renamed the Douglas Hospital after Dr James Douglas in 1965 as a tribute to both him and his father.

Though historians most often remember his donations to the Memorial Hospital of New York, I’ve found a few inaccurate mentions of a donation of nearly a million dollars in radium to Johns Hopkins University in 1913. Douglas never donated to Johns Hopkins, but his partner, Dr Kelly, did. Douglas will eventually give away a total of 3.75 grams away later to Memorial Hospital, which was half of what he and Kelly had mined in three plus years between 1913 and 1917.

I feel it incumbent upon myself to thoroughly lay out Douglas’s history here so that we may know the man for who he is rather than the person painted by historians with an agenda.

But first I want you to meet Dr James S Ewing. Ewing dedicated his life to studying cancer. By 1910 he had published some 50 papers from his work in his laboratory, concluding that the best hope for controlling cancer was to study the disease in man. He proposed to the New York Hospital to establish a commission to study human cancer, but was turned down. It was then that he met Dr James Douglas who was looking to support cancer research. Together they approached the Memorial Hospital.

Memorial Hospital was founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital. It soon became known as simply Memorial Hospital, that is, until approached by James Douglas offering a $100,000.00 donation (nearly $2.5 million by today’s standards).

Historians point out that the offer came with a few conditions.

From the book, Reclaiming Our Health, page 231, by John Robbins:

From the Society of Surgical Oncology’s web site we get:

Mullins has three conditions in his book:

If there were more conditions, we do not know of them, but all three of these conditions seem to have been accepted as the hospital was renamed in 1916 to: General Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases, Ewing was installed as the chief pathologist, and the use of radium therapy at the hospital began a slow but steady climb.

One thing we must take into consideration when Douglas made these conditions was that the amount of pure radium in the world at that time was small, though not very much was needed for any purpose. Some huckster could take a milligram of radium and make a million barrels of “radium water.” Radium water, by the way, was just one of the products accepted by the AMA Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry in 1914.

Dr Josephson in his book, Your Life is Their Toy, points out that this new cancer “cure” boosted radium’s value. He claims that the price rose 1000% in just four years, though he does not tell us which four years. We can assume they were prior to 1913 because he also tells us that at that time radium sold at almost ten million dollars a pound.

We know this was prior to 1913 because, in a paper presented by Dr. Bertrand Goldschmidt at the Fourteenth International Symposium held by the Uranium Institute in London, September 1989 entitled Uranium's Scientific History 1789 - 1939 we learn that in 1913 radium sold for $160,000 per gram, which would make a pound of radium worth well over ten million dollars; a pound would cost $72,574,720.00. However, I have no clue why we're even talking about pounds since it would be years before a pound would have been mined and refined.  

Goldschmidt also tells us that by 1913 just 20 grams of radium had been produced in France and Austria, and World War I was just about to bring all European mining to a halt for a period of time.

It was during the war that Douglas and Kelly would buy up radium claims in the US and discover a cheaper process for  refining the final product.

I’ve included, below, a picture of the original New York Times article published on October 24^th, 1913, entitled: "Radium Cure Free to All."

The image above is from a book/pamphlet published in 1918 called Chemical & Metallurgical Engineering, Volume 19, edited by Eugene Franz Roeber, Howard Coon Parmelee. Click on the image above to visit Google Books to read the piece in a clearer version.