Medicine: A Whiff of Phage

At all hours of the day, seven days a week, the two-story colonial house on High Street in West Medford, six miles north of Boston, is full of bustle. Patients with almost every disease in the book, from sinus trouble to tuberculosis and cancer, crowd the wooden benches in the waiting room. Every now & then, one goes through a side door to see Dr. Robert Edward Lincoln, 52, who asks about their complaints. Dr. Lincoln is most interested in whether they have had grippe or flu during certain epidemic seasons. Whatever ails them, he is pretty sure that he has the right treatment.

Beyond the waiting room is the treatment room. Syringes filled with an amber fluid lie on a counter. Along one wall are chairs for four patients, and behind them are tanks of compressed air. The treatment: the patient sits in a chair and an attendant fits respirator tubes in his nostrils. After a flick of a valve, the patient inhales a mixture of air and Dr. Lincoln’s bacteriophage* in one of its two varieties, Alpha or Beta. Patients who cannot walk indoors for treatment can get curb service in their cars.

“Smash “Em!” Last week the Massachusetts Medical Society asked Dr. Lincoln to resign from its membership. After months of painstaking inquiry, a committee of the society had found him guilty of unethical conduct. It had uncovered no evidence that the bacteriophage treatment caused direct harm to the patients, though committee members worried that it might. But the committee held that it is wrong for Dr. Lincoln to use a single, unproved treatment for all manner of diseases when his patients might be cured or relieved by tried & true methods.

The outcry was loud and prompt. Like many a medical evangelist, Dr. Lincoln has a handful of devoted disciples. Among them: New Hampshire’s Senator Charles W. Tobey.* “Smash ’em right in the eyes!” howled Tobey when he heard what the medical society had done. “Lick ’em like a custard! They’re crucifying a wonderful man—a genius.” By no coincidence, Tobey is one of Lincoln’s patients; he insists on getting the bacteriophage treatment three or four times a week in the office of Capitol Physician George Calver. He says that it has considerably reduced his high blood pressure.

Another Lincoln patient is Tobey’s daughter, Mrs. Louise Dean, who was treated for multiple sclerosis. Still another is Charles W. Tobey Jr., 41, who had an operation and X-ray treatment for cancer of lymph tissues before he tried Lincoln’s tame viruses. Now he gives much or most of the credit for his improvement to the Lincoln treatment.

Alpha to Beta. Dr. Lincoln, a graduate of Boston University School of Medicine in 1926, had an ordinary general practice in Medford until 1946, when he cultured some staphylococcus germs from a patient’s nose. He noticed that the culture was being eaten away, so he sent it to a friend at Boston University, who told him that he had a bacteriophage in the test tube. Soon, the friend began growing the germs and their sidekicks, the phages, in murky bottles. Dr. Lincoln used the extracted phage material to drip into the noses of patients with minor ailments, generally sinusitis.

Most patients had a mild reaction, such as a slight fever, and then felt better. But one got an inflammation of the liver, and Dr. Lincoln decided that germs of what he calls Strain Alpha must somehow have been transmuted into Strain Beta, with its own phage. With two phages at hand, Dr. Lincoln went on to treat grippe and liver inflammation. Soon he spread out to treat laryngitis, tonsillitis, abscessed teeth, neuralgia, cataract and glaucoma. By 1948 he was treating cancer and tuberculosis.

Impatient Patients. By that time, Dr. Lincoln claimed to have an “entirely new system of medicine,” and his fame was spreading far beyond the elm-lined streets of Medford. In Arkansas, Dr. Jacob S. Schirmer, graduate of a shut-down diploma mill and one-time follower of Cancer Quack William Koch, got the local franchise for the Lincoln treatment. Other “fellows” of the Lincoln Foundation set up shop in 22 states.

To Medford went many patients who could not be helped by standard medical practice or were impatient with their slow progress. Many felt better at first. This is natural, says the Massachusetts Medical Society, because a lot of patients will respond hopefully to any change in treatment. But of nine TB cases on which the medical society’s committee reported, two were maintaining improvement begun under other treatment, five were worse and two were dead. Several cancer patients had died shortly after Dr. Lincoln reported them “much improved.”

Dr. Lincoln said he had no idea of resigning from the society: “I have some Irish in me, and this ought to be a damned good fight before it is over.” In Washington, Senator Tobey called for a congressional investigation of the society, scented a sinister plot by organized medicine and big drug companies to deny the people the “benefits” of the Lincoln system.

* From the Greek for “germ eater.” Bacteriophages are tiny particles, believed to be viruses, which live happily with some bacteria but destroy others. The theory behind attempts to use them in medicine is like the theory of antibiotics, but most phages are too choosy about the bacteria they will feed upon. Medical researchers have found very limited uses for them. * For other news of Senator Tobey, see PEOPLE.