When Doctor Cornelius Packard “Dusty” Rhoads died of a coronary occlusion on 13 August 1959, he was honoured. The Sloane-Kettering Institute, New York’s leading cancer research centre, described him as “one of the principal pioneers in the development of treatment of cancer by drugs”. An article in the journal Science honoured his “courageous and imaginative leadership”, and on the 20th anniversary of his death the American Association for Cancer Research established an award in his name.
And why shouldn’t he be honoured? A Harvard educated pathologist, Dr Rhoads is regarded as one of the most important cancer researchers of the 20th century. In mainland America he was celebrated, receiving the Legion of Merit in 1945, three honorary doctorates, and the directorship of several research foundations. The cover of Time magazine’s 1949 issue proudly bore his face on the cover, above the words “Cancer Fighter”.
Yet, 1000km off the coast of Florida in the US overseas territory of Puerto Rico, a far different man is remembered. Indeed, 1949 was not the first time Rhoads featured in Time magazine. In February 1932, a private letter written by Rhoads appeared in Time after being publicised by the Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos, a fellow Harvard graduate: “Porto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. What this island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8”.
With help from the public relations department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, Rhoads adeptly salvaged his reputation. He insisted that these words were a parody, a mere satirical “joke” intended as a “fantastic and playful composition”. The Puerto Rican Governor Beverly reluctantly accepted his apology, and, on the mainland at least, business as usual resumed. On Puerto Rico, however, Rhoads’ indiscretion was not so easily forgotten.
In order to understand Rhoads’ relationship with the island of Puerto Rico, one must go back to June 1931, at the beginning of his experimental career. Fresh off a stint at the Rockefeller Hospital, Rhoads joined leading Harvard haematologist William B. Castle under the newly formed Rockefeller Anaemia Commission. Castle’s primary focus was anaemia caused by hookworm, a soil borne disease then prevalent in the Southern United States. Puerto Rico, as an overseas territory, offered the perfect environment to test any potential treatments, away from the regulations in the continental United States. Any success could be applied similarly on the mainland. Any failure would go unnoticed.
Rhoads was not the first American scientist to work in Puerto Rico. In 1900, Bailey K. Ashford had begun efforts to fight hookworm on the island; but while Ashford had actively sought collaboration with the Puerto Ricans, by training doctors and educating the public, Rhoads adopted a far more callous approach. Rhoads made the most of Puerto Rico’s obscurity; refusing treatment to some of his anaemia patients so he could compare progress with treated ones. He even tried to induce anaemia in others, referring to them as ‘experimental animals’: “If they don’t develop something they certainly have the constitution of oxen”. 5 months into his stay, Rhoads discovered one night that his car had been vandalised and burgled. Exasperated, he sat down in his office and penned his now infamous letter to a colleague in Boston.
The truth behind Cornelius Rhoads’ letter is far from clear-cut. While his anaemia experiments are well documented, whether he actually killed 8 of his patients remains a mystery. Evidence was presented that Rhoads failed to sterilise his needles, and the investigation set up to examine his activities found a second letter, which was “even worse than the first”. It was suppressed, and Rhoads was declared a “mental case or unscrupulous person” but not a murderer. A 2003 study by Yale bioethicist Jay Katz reached a similar conclusion.
The Rhoads affair ignited Puerto Rican politics. For years, Puerto Ricans had been looked down upon; not only did the United States occupy the island, but it also refused to consider granting it statehood. Thus, Puerto Rico was economically dependent on the US, and so compelled to maintain an unequal relationship. At the same time, however, it enjoyed none of the benefits of statehood and representation.
The scandal proved to be a mere graze on Rhoads’ reputation, with The Washington Post referring to the incident as a “jocular letter” that had been blown out of proportion by Puerto Rican nationalists. He continued to thrive at the Rockefeller Institute, becoming director of Memorial Hospital in New York in 1940, and becoming vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1942. During the war, he was promoted to Colonel in the United States Army. This led to a second blotch on Rhoads’ reputation.
After Fritz Haber released chlorine gas at Ypres in 1915, the threat of chemical warfare was ever-present. The US, though pledging not to be the first to use gas in the Second World War, nonetheless manufactured it in large quantities. As chief of medicine in the Chemical Weapons Division of the US Army, Rhoads was made responsible for testing all new gases and equipment. Filled with patriotic words and bribed with extra leave, Rhoads’ human subjects would be none other than US Army soldiers.
The World War Two mustard gas experiments files were declassified in 1993. Participants underwent three types of tests. In the drop tests, liquid was applied to their skin. In the field test, planes sprayed them with the chemical from overhead. In the chamber tests, also known as the “man-break tests”, soldiers were locked in gas chambers and gassed until they faltered. Court martial was threatened to those who sought to leave before completion.
Rollin Edwards, now 93, who was one of these soldiers, described the experiments: “It felt like you were on fire. Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out”. If the Puerto Rico case had a racial undertone to it, the mustard gas experiments were overtly and explicitly about race. Edwards describes: “They said we were being tested to see what effects these gases would have on black skin”. African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were all tested to see if they would fare differently against mustard agents. In the following decades, these men suffered lung disease, cancer, skin abnormalities, psychological damage, and scarred genitals. They were sworn to secrecy – many told their families only on their deathbeds.
Did this suffering serve any purpose? According to medical historian Susan Smith, the US Army sought to determine how chemical weapons performed under tropical conditions and to search for the “ideal chemical soldier” to resist chemical attacks. However, as the highest-ranking doctor involved, Rhoads’ complete lack of moral qualms in approving these human tests nonetheless remains shocking. Indeed, Rhoads not only tolerated but enthusiastically furthered the experiments, establishing medical testing stations (such as on San Jose Island), and arranging the transport of men to be gassed. He recommended how to conduct the experiments and commented on the results of how people of different skin colours responded to chemical burns.
If the backlash to the Puerto Rican scandal in 1931 was muted, the backlash to the mustard gas experiments was non-existent. In fact, Rhoads was rewarded for the systematic, race-based gassing of hundreds of soldiers; in 1945 he won a Legion of Merit for “combatting poison gas and other advances in chemical warfare”.
After the war, Rhoads transferred his Chemical Warfare Service program to a drug development program. This was funded at a new centre with a $4 million grant from the president of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan. With money, a state-of-the-art laboratory, and a hospital full of terminally ill patients readily able to agree to experimental treatments, Rhoads no longer needed to hide his malpractice in Panama or Puerto Rico. He could do it on the mainland, not only out in the open, but under the active endorsement of some of the most powerful men in the country.
Testing chemical after chemical, Rhoads described his “frontal attack with all our forces” on cancer. He was honoured with a cover on Time and heralded in the journal Science as “one of the most prominent American researchers of his day”. Recipients of the Cornelius P Rhoads Memorial Award by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) have become Nobel Laureates.
Celebrated on the mainland as a pioneer in chemotherapy, Rhoads is reviled in Puerto Rico. In 2002 the AACR renamed its award; it had not even been aware of any controversy surrounding Rhoads until a complaint was lodged by the University of Puerto Rico. A number of factors ensured that Rhoads’ darker side never came to wider attention. Puerto Rico’s distance from America, the persistence of racist ideas, as well as Rhoads’ admired and respected position in American society all allowed his experiments to happen.
The story of Cornelius Rhoads perhaps best represents the twofold nature of early 20th century America. On the one hand, a prosperous society of technological advancement, content with the illusion that it was on the ‘right side’ of history. A maturing society, coming to terms with its hegemony. Yet on the other, lies the misuse of its power and the cost at which this illusion came, a cost too unpleasant for the public to know about, and a cost that all too often came at the expense of people of colour.
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Heller, J.R. (1960). Cornelius Packard Rhoads, Leader in Cancer Research. Science, [online] 131(3399), pp.486–487. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706107?
Lederer, S.E. (2002). ‘Porto Ricochet’: Joking about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s. American Literary History, [online] 14(4), pp.720–746. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3568022?
SOUTHERN PRACTICE OF EATING DIRT SHOWS SIGNS OF WANING. (1984). The New York Times.
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COL. RHOADS IS CITED FOR POISON GAS STUDY; WINS LEGION OF MERIT. (1945). The New York Times.