The treatment of inoperable sarcoma by bacterial toxins (the mixed toxins of the Streptococcus erysipelas and the Bacillus prodigiosus) / by William B. Coley.

  • Coley, William Bradley, 1862-1926.
Date:
1909
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The treatment of inoperable sarcoma by bacterial toxins (the mixed toxins of the Streptococcus erysipelas and the Bacillus prodigiosus) / by William B. Coley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Letter No. 2. ] New York, June 17, 1908. My dear Dr. Coley,—Thank you for your note informing me about the brilliant and lasting result in the case of Harry Miller. It is the most gratifying case within my experience. May you have many more such ! Truly yours, A. G. Gerster. Dr. Coley further stated that he had shown this patient before the Society of Greater New York, in February, 1909, in perfect health, with no trace of the tumour either in the tonsil or neck. He added that the patient remained well at present. Dr. Coley stated that instead of in the beginning advising the mixed toxins as a method of treatment for cancer in general, he had begun by strictly limiting it to cases of inoperable sai’coma, and only after long experience had he felt justified on basis of the results obtained in extending its field of usefulness as a prophylactic after operation, and before operation to the limited group of cases where operation meant the sacrifice of a limb. With reference to the remarks of Sir Almroth Wright, Dr. Coley stated that he must take exception to the method being classed as purely empirical and in the nature of a quack remedy, without laboratory basis. He had tried to show in his paper that the method was an absolutely scientific one : (l) Because it was founded upon a long array of demonstrable clinical facts—namely, a large series of cases of inoperable sarcoma that had disappeared under attacks of accidental erysipelas, and the patients had remained permanently cured. (2) The method rested upon the’further fact that in a large number of cases of inoperable sarcomas treated with the mixed toxins of erysipelas and Bacillus prodigiosus the tumours had disappeared, and a goodly proportion of these cases had remained well from three to fifteen years, the diagnosis having been verified clinically and micro- scopically by the most competent men in surgery and pathology. (3) The addition of the Bacillus prodigiosus was not an empirical thing at all, but rested upon laboratory investigations of Boger, who found that the Bacillus pro- digiosus grown together with the streptococcus of erysipelas greatly increased the virulence of the latter. It was this fact that led Dr. Coley to try the addition of the Bacillus prodigiosus to the erysipelas toxins. (4) The method during the last two years had been submitted to actual laboratory tests, and the investigations of Dr. Martha Tracy and Dr. S. P. Beebe, of the Huntington Cancer Besearch Fund, at the Loomis Laboratory, Cornell University Medical School, had demonstrated that multiple sarcomas in dogs disappear under injections of tiie mixed toxins, and, still more important, under the injections of the Bacillus prodigiosus alone. John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Ltd., 83-91, Great Titchlield St reet, London. W.
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