Coley’s Dramatic Cancer Cures, Part 3: Obituary of Helen Coley Nauts

Helen Coley Nauts tries unsuccessfully to sell her wares to Dr Lloyd Old of Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

So far this series presented two dramatic cures by the use of Coley’s toxins. One was in 1893 and the other in 1901. Many more will be presented, and one unsuccessful attempt by Coley..

Let me say where this series is headed. In one sense, it’s not headed anywhere – the case histories have value on their own – and they may open the possibility to a revival of that particular treatment.

In keeping with many of my themes at GumshoeNews, however, this series is also headed toward a claim that Coley’s cure was suppressed, in order that more people would die of cancer. Indeed I think millions have died needlessly of cancer.

In my review of 18 cures for cancer, in Consider the Lilies (2013), I named two successful curers who I think knowingly participated in the suppression of their excellent work. One was Dr Thomas Glover whose cure was a serum; the other was Dr William Coley (1862-1936) whose cure came from bacteria’s production of toxins.

Coley and Glover may have been sent on a mission to find their cures by yet an earlier scientist whose name we do not know. That is to say, I do not necessarily accept the legend as to how Coley happened upon his cure. It may be true or apocryphal.

The legend is that he had a patient, Besse Dasheil, a young woman with bone cancer who died, despite amputation of the arm. She was the girlfriend of the philanthropist John Rockefeller Jr (1839-1937). The death distressed Coley, so he scoured the records in his hospital for others who had that type of bone cancer. He found 15, of which 14 had died of cancer.

The sole survivor was a man who, by chance, had contracted erysipelas while in hospital. It led to a fever and immediately he overcame his cancer. The take-away from that could be that high fever does the job, or that the erysipelas does the job. I am not a doctor and will not be weighing in on that, although this series will later contain quotes from various doctors as to the way in which Coley’s cure worked.

Grounds for Skepticism

Both Glover and Coley had terrific success, yet neither published a comprehensive report. Granted, they entered some of their findings into the journals of the day. For example, in 1911 Coley published in Surgery, Gynacology and Obstetrics, an article entitled “A report of recent cases of inoperable sarcoma treated with mixed toxins of erysipelas and bacillus prodigiosus.”

And some persons did further research on Coley’s toxins. For example, in 1909, L Noon published in Lancet, “The influence of site of the inoculation on the immunity produced.”

But you would think that the two major figures quoted in Part 2 – William J Welch and James Ewing – who approved of the toxins, would have jumped up and down about this answer to the great scourge of cancer. But they did not. Welch, by the way, was a member of the Order of Skull and Bones.

My own skeptism is a matter of prejudice. I have seen some fabulous cancer scholars maligned (Emanuel Revici, MD), jailed (William Reich, MD), put out of business (Virginia Livingston, MD), or ignored (Alan Cantwell, MD). Typically they get labelled quacks. I know for sure that Someone Somewhere orders all such glimmerings of hope to be trounced.

Thus it may be that I leap too readily to the idea that Coley’s cure was suppressed. I might mention that he and Glover never got the smearing that others got. I attribute this to their having been agents of government in the first place.

Similarly, Dr George Criley (1864-1943) whom I all but adore, seems to me to have voluntarily dropped his great work on electric medicine, in a deal with The Powers That Be. Or, to put it more kindly, I think the US government explained to him that electric theory was going to become an important basis of weaponry and he should keep silent out of patriotic motives.

The Devoted Daughter

Probably none of us would know anything today about Coley’s cure if his daughter Helen had not insisted on publishing it. In the photo above, Nauts is pictured with Dr Lloyd Old, the head of Sloan Kettering (the later name for Memorial Hospital). You will hear in the video below, by Ralph Moss, that Old was a resource for Helen, but I don’t think so.

She was not appreciated. I quote Matthew Tontonoz form an April 1, 2015 article at cancerresearch.org:

“Nauts also pursued the option of obtaining a job at Memorial, where, in addition to Rhoads [God help us!], she also had a contact in the form of a family friend, a doctor named Henry Pratt. Nauts apparently asked Pratt if the hospital might … sponsor her to receive a grant. Pratt was dismissive, writing on May 5, 1947: ‘I am sorry to say that the general feeling is that this would not be legitimate in that your activities would be in a field requiring extensive knowledge of medical problems and your lack of training in this field hardly qualifies you’.

Note in the obituary below, that Nauts is not nearly given the credit she deserves and indeed the New York Times makes it sound like she was a bad mother. But the many a New York Times obituary gives a distorted impression of the decedent.

New York Times Obituary of Helen Coley Nauts

Written by Eric Nagourney, published January 9, 2001. Bolding added:

Helen Coley Nauts, who devoted her life to championing the once-neglected cancer-treatment discoveries of her father and founded a cancer institute, died at home last Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 93.

Mrs. Nauts was the daughter of Dr. William B. Coley, a surgeon and cancer specialist who, trying to help seriously ill patients for whom he had been able to do nothing, hit on the idea of injecting them with a mixture of live bacteria. The goal was to goad the body into producing its own defenses against cancer.

Dr. Coley, who practiced at what became the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, recorded many cures with bacteria injection, but his successes were not easily replicated and could not be explained. The method came to be dismissed by much of the medical establishment as unproven, even quackery, and was eventually overshadowed by radiation and chemotherapy.

After her father died in 1936, Mrs. Nauts, who was at home raising two daughters, decided to go through his papers to write his biography. As she did, she came across many records of seriously ill cancer patients who, after being injected with what are still referred to as ”Coley’s toxins,” appeared to have recovered.

Convinced that medicine was overlooking a powerful tool — and, perhaps more important, her associates say, incensed at the aspersions the medical establishment had cast on her father and his work — Mrs. Nauts embarked on a crusade.

In 1953, she established the Cancer Research Institute, which now has an annual budget of $14 million and provides support for scientists around the world. She eventually succeeded in returning her father’s work to the attention of oncologists.

”She was inflamed a gran,” said Dr. Lloyd J. Old, an immunotherapy expert at Sloan-Kettering and a longtime friend. ”She was absolutely inflamed by a grand idea.” [So am I.]

Dr. Coley is now often described as the founder of modern immunotherapy, a major cancer treatment. Although Coley’s toxins are rarely used, his discoveries of the late 19th century are credited with helping researchers develop more modern therapies. And Mrs. Nauts has received many awards for her work.

The theory that the body’s defenses can be brought to bear in the fight against disease was not new when William Coley began putting them into practice. The concept dates to antiquity. But Dr. Coley was one of the first to use bacteria to fight cancer systematically and, at least by the medical standards of his day, methodically.

He got the idea after learning of a cancer patient with a sometimes fatal skin infection, not uncommon among surgery patients then. The patient survived the infection but his cancer had fared less well; it seemed to have disappeared. After finding similar cases in the records, Dr. Coley set out to develop a cancer vaccine made from bacteria. [not vaccine n the sense of prevention]

Despite his successes and initially positive reactions from colleagues, Dr. Coley was never able to win broad support for his treatment and, according to a 1984 article in Science magazine, died a disappointed man. [Really?]

Helen Lancaster Coley, his daughter with his wife, the former Alice Lancaster, was born Sept. 2, 1907, in Sharon, Conn., and was raised in New York City. She attended the Brearley School in Manhattan and Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Conn., then studied landscape architecture for a time at Columbia.

But she came from a milieu and a time in which she was not expected to pursue a career. Her husband, William Boone Nauts, who died about a decade ago, was a banker, and Mrs. Nauts raised her children, did volunteer work and some landscape design.

All that changed after her father’s death, when she began poring over 15,000 letters and other records stored in a barn in Sharon. Dr. Coley had been a clinician, not a researcher, and the task of giving order to the papers was monumental.

About two years later, Mrs. Nauts went to the medical director of Dr. Coley’s hospital and said she thought that her father’s work deserved reappraisal. Her best course of action, she was told, was to put together 100 or so case histories; she eventually produced 1,000, along the way educating herself about cancer. She was so precise that cancer researchers today still examine the monographs she published for clues about the disease, Dr. Old said.

In an interview with Science, Mrs. Nauts described a meeting with a Mount Sinai Hospital bacteriologist, Dr. Gregory Shwartzman, with whom her father had corresponded.

”I had read Shwartzman’s book on the reaction of tumors to bacteria, and had prepared 13 pages of questions based on it,” Mrs. Nauts recalled. ”During the interview, I took 80 pages of notes. Shwartzman couldn’t believe anyone could be that thorough. But because I had no medical education, I had to be that way.”

In the years that followed, Mrs. Nauts wrote thousands of letters to doctors and patients who had used her husband’s methods, seeking specifics about their cases. Her efforts were not always welcomed by the medical establishment. [Right.]

”At times the response to her could be described as vitriolic,” said Dr. Alan M. Houghton, chairman of immunotherapy at Sloan-Kettering. But Mrs. Nauts was unyielding, and as the field of immunotherapy grew, researchers recognized the value of Dr. Coley’s once-ignored work.

Even some admirers say she may have lost perspective at times. [Bet she didn’t.] And family members — Mrs. Nauts is survived by two daughters, Phyllis Lancaster Nauts of Cornwall, Conn., and New York, and Nancy Nauts Dobbs of the British Virgin Islands and Bali, Indonesia — said her crusade could be hard on her family.

”We felt she spent much too much time,” Mrs. Dobbs said. ”I remember once saying to her, ‘Mommy, let’s play.’ And she said, ‘I can’t play, because people are dying when I’m not working.’ ” [Makes sense to me]

Ralph Moss and Laetrile

Ralph Moss came in favour of laetrile as a cancer cure at a time then it was forbidden. I happen to think he is the controlled opposition. In this brief interview he speaks of Dr Coley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Ky2z8x3Mw

I add that I have not studied laetrile, however, a layperson whom I respect, Ed Griffin (best known for his research on the Federal Reserve Bank) worked on it intensively and came up with approval. See an introduction here..

— Mary W Maxwell is a law researcher with a swag of grand ideas. A swagwoman, so to speak. In fact a jolly swagwoman.