Babe Ruth was cancer research guinea pig
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The story of Babe Ruth's bittersweet farewell at Yankee Stadium has been part of sports lore for generations. Shockingly stooped and frail, the slugger came to the Bronx ballpark on June 13, 1948, to put on the pinstriped uniform a last time and hear the roar of the faithful once more.He died only two months later, on August 16, at age 53, by most accounts of throat cancer, brought on at least in part by a well-chronicled fondness for tobacco and liquor. But that's all wrong, says a Westchester County, N.Y., dentist with a passion for baseball history. And he's trying to set the record straight.
They all said he had throat cancer -- an easy conclusion because he was well-known for drinking, smoking and using tobacco. In fact, he died of a very rare cancer. And what I found out was that this larger-than-life celebrity was a pioneer in early cancer research."
"I was stunned," says granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti. "It was the first I was reading that my grandfather did not have throat cancer. My mother, Dorothy, always thought it was throat cancer. So did the whole country."
Maloney uncovered little-known information about the experimental treatment that the doomed baseball titan agreed to take part in, the kindness Ruth showed toward medical staff during his difficult final days and the rare form of cancer he actually died from, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (it causes less than 1 percent of the cancer deaths in the U.S. today).
And although the exact cause of Ruth's death had been noted in the scientific community -- it was the subject of an article by a group of San Francisco doctors who turned up his autopsy results in 1998 -- biographies about Ruth all but missed it.
"They completely skip over his illness, and they got it all wrong," Maloney says. "They all said he had throat cancer -- an easy conclusion because he was well-known for drinking, smoking and using tobacco. In fact, he died of a very rare cancer. And what I found out was that this larger-than-life celebrity was a pioneer in early cancer research."
Ruth agreed to take part in an experimental drug trial, one that had never been tried on humans. A number of doctors warned against it in an age when medical experimentation was far less regulated.
