"Malignant Tumors"

The malignant disease which killed Senator Robert A. Taft was of a fairly uncommon but not rare type.* Its characteristics: the extensive spread through the patient's body, and the speed with which it advanced.

The first signs of illness that the Senator noted, last April, were pains in his legs. In May he had severe pain in his left hip. Four days of examinations and tests in the Army's Walter Reed General Hospital did not show definitely what was wrong, but by a process of elimination they raised a suspicion of cancer. Senator Taft flew to Cincinnati and entered Christian R. Holmes Hospital. There, samples of tissue were taken from nodules found under his skin. The tissues contained abnormal cells. To double-check, Cincinnati sent samples to Manhattan's Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases. Memorial's pathologists agreed that the cells indicated a "malignancy." What kind, or where it had started, no one could be sure. Taft was told that he "might have cancer." Even before he left Cincinnati, more nodules broke out in his mouth and on his chest and back.

Taft was determined that Mrs. Taft, who had suffered a stroke in 1950, should be spared the truth as long as possible. To enter Memorial Hospital would have been to advertise the nature of his illness. Instead, he put himself under the care of Dr. Claude E. Forkner, no cancer specialist but an internist. Using the name Howard Roberts Jr., Taft entered Manhattan's topnotch New York Hospital, right across the street from Memorial. Specialists from Memorial consulted with New York's staff. Taft received X-ray treatments which relieved the pain in his hip, and transfusions to combat anemia. To find out whether something more could be done, the doctors recommended an exploratory operation.

At New York Hospital, Surgeon Frank Glenn opened the Senator's abdomen in the hope of finding that the malignancy had originated in a specific organ; then the primary site could be removed, or treated with radiation. But no such site could be found. A growth was found in one kidney, but it was not the primary site. The abnormal cells were all over, and new experimental chemicals proved useless against them. The doctors (no less than 46 were brought in) sadly concluded that they could do nothing more for Taft than make his last days comfortable.

Not until the end had come for Senator Taft could the doctors be certain what type of growth had killed him. The autopsy showed that it had been carcinoma, which in the patient's last days had reached the brain.

*To laymen his disease was "cancer." To specialists, this means carcinoma, which is only one type of malignant tumor. Others: sarcoma, lymphosarcoma, myeloma.

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