Radium and the Origins of the National Cancer Institute

124 C a n t o rTumor Clinic Founded:Sources: See endnotes.Notes: This column lists the dates the tumor clinic was founded, if known. Some hospitals wereserial founders of clinics; hence the multiple entries. Also, because records of the creation of allclinics have not been identified, there are some discrepancies between the dates in this columnand the dates of approval. For example, Worcester City Hospital had an approved clinic beforethe founding of what must have been a new clinic in 1939.Abbreviations:TC= Tumor Clinic, Olc= Oncological Clinic, CC = Cancer Clinic, TI = Tumor Institute,CI = Cancer Institute, CW = Cancer Ward, TG = Tumor Group, TConf = Tumor conference.D – Approved as a diagnostic clinicH – Approved as a cancer hospitalThe Johns Hopkins University was approved as an institution in which departments werecarrying out approved cancer clinics.NotesAcknowledgments: The research for this paper was undertaken as part of myDeWitt Stetten, Jr., Memorial Fellowship in the History of BiomedicalSciences and Technology at the National Institutes of Health History Office.I am particular indebted to Victoria Harden, who helped me root out pertinentNCI archives and encouraged me to visit countless archives and libraries acrossthe country to trace records of the radium loan program. I am also grateful to themany archivists and librarians who helped me locate these records; too manyto acknowledge individually, but special mention should go to Judy Grosbergwho helped me locate what records survived at the NCI. The paper also benefitedfrom the support of Nancy Brun, then chief of the NCI’s InformationResources Branch. Earlier versions of this paper were given at my DeWittStetten, Jr., Lecture at the NIH, 28 June 2001, and at the “Biomedicine in theTwentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics” conference held at theNIH, 5-6 December 2005.Note on sources: The NCI’s archives are split in several sites, and the followingabbreviations are used: NCI archives (refers to archives listed in the NCI’sLION database); NCI records (refers to archives obtained through the recordsmanagers, Ressa Nichols and Karen Hubbard); National Archives (refers toNCI archives held at the National Archives at College Park). The creation of acancer clinic and the arrival of government radium were often reported in localpapers. I relied on newspaper clippings files maintained by local city and countylibraries and some hospitals and university centers to identify these reports,and most newspaper citations are from these files. Newspapers are generallycited by the name and date that is given in the clippings file, for example theSt. Louis Globe-Democrat, is listed here as the St. Louis Globe. The librariesfrom which the clippings are taken are generally not cited here unless they arenon-local.