Medical records of first chemo patient
Posted by staff / February 23, 2011
During World War II, a cancer patient known only as J.D. agreed to undergo experimental treatment with nitrogen mustard, the first intravenous chemotherapy. Researchers only recently found his medical records that have been lost for almost 70 years. The records offer insight not only into how much the treatment has changed, but also how much it has remained the same.
“It was all there,” says John Fenn, a Yale University physician who helped track down the records. “In one patient, there was the revelation that cancer would respond to chemical injections, and that chemotherapy also had potentially lethal implications in the depression of bone marrow.”
Full story at Futurity.
Photo credit: Yale University
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