The Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Case

Abstract

Abstract During the summer of 1963, Chester M. Southam and Deogracias B. Custodio together injected live, cultured cancer cells into the bodies of 22 debilitated patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital ( JCDH) in Brooklyn, New York. Custodio, a Philippineborn, unlicensed medical resident at JCDH, was participating in a medical experiment designed by Southam, a distinguished physician-researcher at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, an attending physician at Memorial Hospital in New York City, and associate professor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College. The purpose of the research was to determine whether the previously established immune deficiency of cancer patients was caused by their cancer or, alternatively, by their debilitated condition. Southam thus looked to a group of noncancerous but highly debilitated elderly patients who might bear out his guiding hypothesis that cancer, not old age, was the cause of the previously witnessed immune deficiency. Importantly, he believed on the basis of long experience that the injection of cultured cancer cells posed no risk to these patients, and that all of the cells would eventually be rejected by their immune systems. Although Southam’s professional credentials were impeccable, and although his work was deemed by his peers to be of the utmost scientific importance, the JCDH experiment soon erupted in a major public controversy. Critics denounced Southam’s methods as being morally comparable to those of the Nazi physicians tried at Nuremburg, whereas his defenders countered that he was a distinguished physician-researcher, and by all accounts an honorable man, who merely had the bad luck to be caught in the shifting rip tides of history.