Medicine: X-Ray Martyr

In a ramshackle Chicago laboratory, an earnest, imaginative young scientist named Emil Grubbe gazed at the greenish glow coming from a Crookes vacuum tube he had made. He put his left hand on the tube. It was warm. Grubbe (pronounced Grew-bay) was satisfied that the tube (useful only in scientific experiments) was working right. By summer's end, a severe skin irritation appeared on Grubbe's left hand. Dermatologists had no idea what it was. Then Grubbe heard that, from similar tubes, Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen had generated a new and mysterious form of radiation—X rays. "I knew then that I had been burned by X rays," says Grubbe. The time: November 1895.

Last week Dr. Grubbe, 84, lay in Chicago's Swedish Covenant Hospital, apparently recovering from surgery for cancer resulting from his work with Crookes tubes. It had been his 92nd operation. The first X-ray martyr—a victim of the rays' effects before their nature was recognized—has proved to be one of the toughest.

Lead Shields. Chicago-born Emil Herman Grubbe got through Valparaiso (Ind.) University at 20, mined platinum in Idaho, and began using the metal in his vacuum tubes. He was teaching chemistry and studying medicine at Chicago's Hahnemann Medical College (a homeopathic school, now defunct). There, three weeks after word of Roentgen's work got out. Grubbe displayed his burned left hand at a faculty meeting. A doctor suggested that anything capable of causing such a reaction in healthy tissue might be used in treating diseased tissue. Another doctor promptly referred a woman with breast cancer to Grubbe for X-ray treatment. Though she died within three months, Grubbe was confident that her tumor's growth had been slowed. And, personally and painfully aware of X rays' dangers, he had already begun devising lead shields to protect healthy parts of the body. Soon Grubbe was treating as many as 75 patients a day.

Not until 1898 did he get his M.D., at once became the world's first professor of roentgenology, ran the first hospital

X-ray department. Says Dr. Grubbe: "I taught more than 7,000 doctors and could never stress enough the dangers inherent in careless handling of X rays. Yet of the 7,000, more than 300 have already died from the effects of radiation. I tried to warn them, but not all of them would listen.''

Finger Exercises. Dr. Grubbe could do nothing to check the slow but relentless advance of his own cancer. In scores of operations, he has lost his left hand (32 years ago) and forearm, most of his nose and upper lip. and much of his upper jaw. He was divorced in 1911, explains:

"I couldn't inflict my disfigurement on anybody else." Since then. Dr. Grubbe has lived alone in an apartment, fixing his own meals (increasingly from cans), has kept up with medical progress, using a magnifier to aid his failing sight.