Senior essay crunch time!

First, I must apologize for the intermittent updates, although hopefully the remainder of this post will help explain why.

For all you incoming freshmen, a senior project is probably the last thing you want to think about, but it has been very much on my mind since September (especially since I have to do two of them!) The requirements vary by department, but you generally have to take a "senior seminar" and/or do original research to be written up and/or presented to peers and faculty. This can be done over one semester or two, with the assumption that a 2-semester essay will be much longer/more detailed.

My HSHM senior essay got its start last spring when I took "Magic Bullets and Wonder Pills" with Bruno Strasser, who is now my essay adviser. Instead of taking the final, you could opt to write a term paper, and one of the potential topics mentioned was the development of chemotherapy at Yale in the early 1940s. I didn't end up writing the paper that semester, but the idea stuck in my head, mainly because I had never heard of it before. I did some preliminary browsing in books about the history of cancer therapy, history of the Yale School of Medicine, etc., but found only vague references, barely a sentence or a paragraph long.

The only thing I found about this exhibit was that it existed.

Last fall, I decided to make this my senior essay topic for a couple reasons. (1) If this discovery was such a big deal, why do so few people know about it? (2) With few secondary sources, I could significantly contribute to the historical literature. (3) I figured there should be enough sources to make my research possible, including scientific papers, Yale archives from that time period, and government documents, since the project was being funded by a government agency known as the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for...

To summarize the idea briefly, Albert Z. Gilman and Louis S. Goodman were two young pharmacology professors at the Yale School of Medicine in 1942-43. They had collaborated on a lot of other things, including a massive pharmacology textbook, and so they were working together on nitrogen mustards, a class of compounds similar to the mustard gas used in WWI. Incredibly, they found that the mustards helped shrink various tumors in terminally ill patients, inoperable cancers that had been resistant to x-ray therapy, the only other treatment option at the time. However, the first papers weren't published until 1946 because they were labeled confidential by the OSRD.

A page from one of the 1946 articles, published in JAMA.
The photo is of one of the first patients, before treatment.

By December, I had exhausted the immediately available resources: Sterling Memorial Library, Yale Manuscripts and Archives, even the Yale New-Haven Hospital Archives. Granted, I found some pretty cool stuff, but they were either tantalizing glimpses of what had happened (e.g. brief notes in correspondence) or write-ups from several years later.

To make things even more frustrating, Gilman and Goodman both left Yale in 1943, so they didn't leave many personal files (other professors who spend their careers here have boxes full of stuff), plus they were much more famous for their textbook (which is now in its ninth edition). Google/Google Scholar didn't work out very well, because Gilman had a son (Alfred Jr.) who won a Nobel Prize in 1994, so his work came up first in every search. Metaphorically, I had a 100-piece puzzle, but I was missing at least 30 pieces.

The solution? Field trip!

If the government documents (that I knew existed but couldn't find copies of) weren't going to come to me, I was just going to have to go to them! After a lot of poking around (including the discovery that there are such things as books without call numbers in the SML reference room), I realized I had to go to the National Archives facility in College Park, MD. Fortunately, I received a generous $500 from the Mellon Fund (which is meant to help seniors cover project costs) and had a friend in DC who graciously let me crash on her couch, so I took the Amtrak and spent 3 days combing through boxes of files, some of which had to be specially declassified since no one had looked at them in decades =P

I literally took a midnight train (well, 12:26), but not to Georgia

Archives II, the College Park facility

Some of my (too many) boxes

Back in New Haven, I'm now compiling all my notes and photographs and starting to write my essay. The finished product isn't due until April 6, which still seems a long way off, but our first drafts are due February 23, which is...uh, coming up too fast!