The baseball star received an experimental medication for his nasopharyngeal cancer, which had a significant impact on contemporary therapy.
George Herman Ruth has generated more eye-catching nicknames than any other baseball player, ranging from the “Sultan of Swat” to the “Colossus of Clout”. You may not be aware of this, but the renowned Babe was also known as a cancer pioneer.
In the last years of his life, Babe Ruth, the legendary slugger who hit 714 home runs and won seven World Series, fought an advanced form of cancer. In the process, he changed the direction of medicine and became one of the first patients worldwide to receive chemotherapy. Even though he passed away at the age of 53 on Friday 76 years ago, the results of his experimental treatment continue to have an impact on cancer care today.
When Ruth was younger, his health wasn’t his top priority.
Born in February 1895, Ruth was the unchallenged baseball king by the time he was thirty. He became the most formidable batter in the game by winning four World Series by 1925—three with the Boston Red Sox and one after his controversial transfer to the New York Yankees in December 1919. After he hit 59 round-trippers in 1921, he broke the record for most home runs in a single season three times in a row.
However, off the pitch, the Great Bambino also had a reputation as a glutton. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council claims that during a doubleheader, Ruth once downed twelve franks and eight bottles of Coke. In addition, he consumed whiskey for breakfast and smoked cigars. Ruth’s habit was once best described by his Yankees colleague Joe Dugan as “Day and night, broads and booze.”
Ruth was soon overtaken by these behaviors. The slugger traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, with the Yankees on April 7, 1925, for an exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, according to The Citizen-Times. Ruth informed colleagues that he felt “indisposed” when they arrived at the train station. He then passed out and collapsed on the platform.
Ruth’s ailment was diagnosed as “acute indigestion” brought on by his bad diet, although there were reports that he passed away during the train voyage back to New York after his collapse. Ruth underwent procedures to remove an ulcer and an intestinal abscess, but this was untrue.
After being suspended from baseball, Ruth changed his ways.
But his comeback to the field in 1925 was short-lived. Ruth’s actions led to an extended suspension by Yankees Manager Miller Huggins in late August. “Being patient is no longer a virtue. Huggins reportedly told The New York Times, “I have tried to overlook Ruth’s behavior for a while, but I have decided to take summary action to bring the big fellow to his senses.”
Ruth seemed to catch the message and started looking after his family and himself more. His batting average increased by 80 points in 1926, and he broke his own major league record the following year with 60 home runs. Ruth played baseball until 1935, when he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the initial five players.
Significant changes also occurred in the outfielder’s home life. Ruth had split from his first wife, Helen, with whom he was raising a daughter, Dorothy, by the mid-1920s. Ruth wed Claire Hodgson, his second wife, in April 1929 and took Julia, her daughter, into adoption.
Ruth and Julia were quite close; Ruth taught Julia to bowl and dance, and in 1934 Ruth even took her to Japan for an event featuring major league all-stars. Julia subsequently remarked, “I couldn’t have had a better father than him.”
Perhaps Ruth even saved her life. The New York Times revealed on August 7, 1938, that Julia’s father gave her a pint of blood after she spent weeks in the hospital due to strep throat and required a blood transfusion. Ruth returned to the hospital in even worse conditions less than ten years later.
Ruth was among the first people to receive chemotherapy.
Ruth was still quite famous even after she left baseball. A passionate golfer, he played alongside Hall of Famer Ty Cobb, winner of the Masters Jimmy Demaret, and the great Olympian Babe Didrikson Zaharias, whose moniker he inspired. During World War II, he also went to see the soldiers and assisted in organizing war bond campaigns. It follows that it should come as no surprise that he had access to the most advanced medications when Ruth become very ill in 1946.
The journal Proceedings from the Mayo Clinic states that Ruth started having headaches and hoarseness behind his left eye. Doctors subsequently discovered Ruth had nasopharyngeal carcinoma, or cancer of the tissue that connects the back of the nose and mouth, nasopharynx, despite the initial diagnosis of throat cancer. Additionally, the disease spread to his lymph nodes, narrowing his carotid artery. Remarkably, it’s unlikely that Ruth ever realized how serious his condition was, as at the time, doctors frequently withheld fatal diagnoses from their patients.
Ruth had surgery and radiation therapy, but the tumor remained, and he started to lose muscular mass and weight. The once-dominant figure spent his fifty-second birthday in the hospital in February of 1947, looking very hopeless. Ruth later said in his book, “I often felt so alone that the tears would run helplessly down my cheeks.”
Later that year, Ruth was invited to take part in a clinical trial for the experimental medication teropterin, which had only been tried on rats, by Dr. Richard Lewisohn and colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Methotrexate, a chemotherapeutic medication used to treat several types of cancer and other illnesses, was developed from teropterin.
Ruth accepted and underwent six weeks of daily treatment, becoming one of the first patients anywhere to get chemotherapy. Ruth didn’t want to know what chemical he was taking or why. Furthermore, according to a 2018 interview with Popular Science by Dr. Nadim Bikhazi, Ruth may have been the first patient to get chemotherapy and radiation therapy in that order—a procedure sometimes colloquially referred to as “chemo-beamo.”
The 1948 biographical film The Babe Ruth Story brought Ruth’s suffering and his unproven treatment to the big screen. Doctors give a dying Ruth an unidentified experimental serum in the movie’s last act to help him fight his disease.
Ruth’s cancer therapy influenced cancer care for many years to come.
Doctors were surprised when Ruth’s teropterin treatments worked at first. Both the size of his glandular swelling and the intensity of his symptoms lessened. His optimistic instance was anonymously reported at a research meeting in September 1947, according to Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Reports from publications like Time and The Wall Street Journal quickly suggested that researchers might have discovered a cancer treatment.
Naturally, that was untrue. Despite the new medication, Ruth’s condition returned quickly. Journalist Noah Gittell states in his 2024 book Baseball: The Movie that he was so ill at a viewing of The Babe Ruth Story that he had to abandon the film midway to go back to the hospital. The more effective aminopterin quickly took over as the go-to cancer treatment.
But Ruth’s situation ended up being a medical first. Ruth barely lived an additional year, but the chemo-beamo technique allowed him to live a much longer time than the usual prognosis at the time.
Ruth had pneumonia and passed away at Memorial Hospital in New York City on August 16, 1938. Over tens of thousands of mourners visited the original Yankee Stadium, often known as the “House That Ruth Built,” where his body remained in state for two days. During his funeral service, they also lined the streets surrounding the well-known St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At Ruth’s tomb in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, admirers have left items such as whiskey, hot dogs, baseball bats, and more as mementos of the legendary Bambino over the decades.
Although Ruth’s achievements on the baseball field have mostly contributed to his heroic reputation, his contributions to medicine have also been substantial. Popular Science claims that chemotherapy wasn’t generally accessible until the 1950s. But today’s treatments are far more effective and focused because of Ruth and the other research participants. Ruth’s kind of advanced nasopharyngeal cancer had a five-year or longer survival rate by 1998, accounting for forty percent of cases.
In his autobiography, Ruth stated, “I realized that if anything was learned about that type of treatment, whether good or bad, it would be of good use to the medical profession and maybe to a lot of people with my same trouble.”
