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Even as hospitals go, Manhattan's famed Memorial Hospital is not a light-hearted place. Its corridors never echo with the happy sounds of a maternity ward. No one is there because of minor ailments or for a good rest. Most of the patients know that their chances of recovery, though somewhat better every year, are poor indeed. Visitors passing through the lobby often look stunned by grief. Memorial is a tragic place because its patients are victims of cancer.
Room 1O2L, a short walk down an immaculate corridor, is one of the most cheerful-seeming places in the hospital. Divided by stiff brown curtains into examination booths, it rings on Friday mornings with the voices of children. A little boy with a Tommy gun shoots sparks at a white-coated doctor, and a plump little girl cradles her doll. In a corner, a nurse in a starched white uniform peers through a microscope and makes a click-click sound with a small, sharp-voiced machine. She is counting in some child's blood the deadly white cells of leukemia: cancer of the blood. All the children in 1O2L of a Friday morning have leukemia, for which no cure is known. All of them, as medicine's knowledge stands at present, will die of the disease.
Tower of Hope. Last week, as he does every week, a man with short-cropped, iron-grey hair, blue eyes and an easy smile stopped in at Room 102L. Dr. Cornelius Packard Rhoads, director of Memorial, the world's biggest cancer hospital, is an outstanding symbol of medicine's determined campaign against a disease which causes one out of every seven deaths in the U.S. Dr. Rhoads also heads the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, whose 14 stories rise beside the hospital. In this tower of hope, the world's most ambitious cancer research laboratory, highly specialized scientists and technicians experiment endlessly in the war against cancer; from it have come strange new treatments that have, so far, kept many leukemic children alive.
"We can help only 25%," says Dr. Rhoads, "and they have remissions only. Their disease will recur and recur, perhaps in more violent form. Some people ask, 'Why keep them alive, if they must die eventually?' But we're moving faster now. Perhaps, before they exhaust their last remission, we'll have something really good. And you've seen how happy they are."
The Wartime Method. Dr. Rhoads's jobs as head of Memorial and of Sloan-Kettering allow him little time for his favorite recreation—sailing. Like most men named Rhoads, he is called "Dusty" by his friends. Born in Springfield. Mass. 51 years ago, he graduated from-Harvard Medical School in 1924. He has long been a successful medical scientist, and today he could be mistaken for the go-getting president of a big university.