In 1891, a young surgeon named William Coley watched a teenage patient die of sarcoma and couldn't let it go. He went looking for a man who had supposedly beaten the same disease after contracting a severe bacterial infection — and found him, cancer-free, in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. What followed was forty years of documented tumor regressions, fierce institutional resistance, and a treatment that was ultimately buried by the rise of radiation and chemotherapy. This episode traces how Coley stumbled onto the foundational principle of cancer immunotherapy a century before medicine had the language to understand it — and how his daughter, with no scientific training and a $2,000 loan, kept the idea alive long enough for the rest of medicine to catch up. For the full written case file, visit thepharmafiles.substack.com.
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