Who Was The First Person To Be Treated With Radiotherapy?
For over a century, people who have cancers, lesions and growths have been advised to go to a radiotherapy centre, where one of the most advanced medical treatments ever invented is used with utter precision to reduce, remove and destroy potentially cancerous cells.
It is the ultimate example of the iterative nature of medical advances, as this cutting-edge technology allows for treatments such as the Gamma Knife to be used effectively to treat brain tumours without causing harm to a particularly delicate part of the body.
As its inventor Lars Leksell once noted, there is no level of precision too precise for the brain.
However, radiotherapy is at least half a century older than the Gamma Knife, and the idea of using radiation to treat disease is almost as old as the discovery of radiation itself.
One Year Later
On 8th November 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays largely by accident, and within a year of a discovery so groundbreaking it invented the field of radiology, it would also be the inspiration for another new field of medical treatment.
He published his original paper a month later on 28th December 1895. A week later, a newspaper in Austria reported the discovery of a new type of radiation, and within weeks of this, doctors were already experimenting with the potential for X-rays not just for diagnosis but for treatment.
Emil Grubbe claimed to be the first person to attempt to treat cancer with X-rays, although the evidence on this is somewhat disputed. Meanwhile, Leopold Freund and Eduard Schiff suggested within a month of the announcement that X-rays could be used to treat diseases such as lupus.
However, the first major treatment using radiation and one of the most influential medical cases in the field of radiotherapy was by French doctor Victor Despeignes, who showed just how effective radiation could be in the treatment of disease if used correctly.
This remains the case even if Dr Despeignes was very wrong about why he thought it would work.
Accidentally Correct
In the middle of 1896, the Lyon-based doctor was visited by a man with an abdominal cancer tumour the size of a baby’s head, and he endeavoured to do what he could to save the man’s life using what were at the time somewhat experimental means.
At the time, conventional medical knowledge claimed that cancer was a parasitic infection rather than a mutation of cells, and so he believed that the antibacterial effects of radiation could be effective at killing the cells
He was right, but not for the right reasons.
Using a Crookes’ tube and half a dozen Radiguet batteries, Dr Despeignes agreed to use radiation to try and kill the cancer, alongside three other treatments at the same time, starting on 4th July 1896.
The man was given a diet of milk and condurango, he was injected with artificial serum and provided a combination of morphine, opium and chloroform to relieve the pain.
These, in combination with twice-daily half-hour radiation treatments, did seem to help relieve the pain for the patient and halved the size of the cancerous tumour, but unfortunately, 20 days after the start of treatment, the 52-year-old man died.
It was far from a controlled experiment, with the issues with artificial serum already known at the time, the dangers of two opioids and chloroform established in the century since, and condurango is an exceptionally controversial choice of ingredient to use.
At the time advertised as a cancer cure and a digestive medicine, condurango could have potentially caused a side effect if the man had a latex allergy.
Because of this, it was easy to look at the positives of the case. The fact that such a huge tumour was reduced by half so quickly was seen as a massive success, and the pursuit of radiotherapy would increase as a result.
It is likely to be the first-ever treatment of cancer with radiation that produced a positive effect, but even if there was an earlier case, Victor Despeignes was the first to be widely reported. Dr Freund’s case the same year was only published in 1901 even if it was first done in 1896.
It created a huge amount of interest in the medical community for radiotherapy and the first successful treatments followed before the end of the 19th century, even if the understanding of how radiation worked and why it affected cancer cells would take a few more years to truly be understood.
However, these early treatments helped to establish the principle, and the following century would turn radiotherapy into a vital, front-line treatment for cancer.