Word: patient
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...throat, stepped into a basement room furnished only with an improvised table, a mirror and an awesome machine. Technicians arranged the cancer victim on the table while Dr. Roger A. Harvey peered through the strange machine's ring sights (like those on an aircraft machine gun) at the patient's neck. When the apparatus was aimed just right, the technicians left the room...
...Harvey ducked into the adjoining control room and peeked at the mirrored image of his patient through a hole three inches wide, bored through the 50-inch lead-shielded wall. Physicist Dr. John S. Laughlin grasped a knob on a black panel and set it at 25 million volts. He set another knob at 100. Then, on a signal from Harvey, Laughlin pushed a big green button...
High Speed. The air was filled with an electric whine. On the white-sheeted table, the patient could hear nothing else. He could see nothing except the grey, perforated wallboard beyond his feet. But coursing through his neck, in invisible bursts 180 times a second, was a beam of X rays whipped up by the 25 million volts to a speed almost exactly equal to that of light. The beam was aimed at the center of the cancer...
...Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston four years ago, with advanced cancer of the prostate which had spread widely through his body. After 15 weeks' treatment he was able to go back to work, taking daily doses of stilbestrol. Periodic checkups showed continued improvement, but a few weeks ago Patient Twaddle fell downstairs, broke his neck and died...
...York suggests that this proportion may eventually be raised to eight out of ten. His method: stilbestrol is used first to reduce an advanced cancer (too far gone to be surgically removed) to smaller, more manageable size. Then, he says, the growth can be cut out and the patient may have years of useful life...