How Did Babe Ruth Really Die?
Everybody who knows anything about baseball history and the lore of the Yankees knows about the death of Babe Ruth and his bittersweet farewell to the Yankee faithful.
Stooped and frail, the Yankee legend came to the Bronx ballpark in 1948 wearing his pinstripe uniform to hear the cheer of the crowd one more time. He died two months later at age 53, reportedly of throat cancer, brought on in part by a fondness for tobacco and liquor.
But that's all wrong, says an Ossining dentist who spent a year researching the circumstances of Ruth's death.
Dr. William Maloney uncovered little-known information about the experimental treatment that the doomed baseball titan agreed to take part in, the way Ruth conducted himself during his final days and the rare form of cancer he actually died from, nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
"In all his biographies, they completely skip over his illness, and they got it all wrong," said Maloney, 41, a Scarsdale resident. "They all said he had throat cancer -an easy conclusion, because he was well-known for drinking, smoking and using tobacco. In fact, he died of a very rare cancer. And what I found out was that this larger-than-life celebrity was a pioneer in early cancer research."
Maloney, a longtime Yankee fan, was familiar with the Ruth legend, and after a trip last year to the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore, he resolved to find out more about Ruth's final days. A love of history and sports - combined with his professional interest in mouth disease as an assistant professor at the NYU College of Dentistry - sent him into the archives for a year.
What he found out surprised even Ruth's descendants, including Babe Ruth's granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti of Durham, Conn.
"I was stunned," she wrote in a recent e-mail. "It was the first I was reading, that my grandfather did not have throat cancer. My mother, Dorothy, always thought it was throat cancer, so did the whole country."
She was pleased to learn from Maloney that the kind of cancer her grandfather died from is not likely to be related to tobacco and alcohol. That Ruth willingly took part in an experimental treatment without any promise of success and showed kindness to the medical staff during a difficult illness were positiive notes.
"I want people to know that he was an humanitarian as well as the greatest slugger in baseball history. He gave to the very end!" she said.
Nasopharyngeal carcinoma causes less than 1 percent of the cancer deaths in the U.S., though the cancer is far more prevalent in parts of Southeast Asia and northern Africa. The nasopharynx is a small area inside the head, above the soft palate and leading to the sinus.
Maloney wrote an article, co-authored with an NYU colleague, that came out last month in the Journal of the American Dental Association, a work he may re-format for a general audience. It was a fascinating intersection of American history, Maloney said, where medical ethics and celebrity culture came together. (Maloney's research about Ruth's death is not entirely new. It was the subject of an article by a group of San Francisco doctors who turned up his autopsy results in 1998, which were reported in The New York Times.)
Ruth was the first person to try a new chemotherapy drug developed by oncologist Richard Lewisohn, over the objections of colleagues who said it was too unproven to try on humans.
Ruth essentially agreed to be a "human guinea pig," Maloney said, in an age when medical experimentation was far less regulated.
The use of the new drug, teropetrin, worked well for Ruth for a short time. It also laid the groundwork for a whole range of more successful chemotherapy treatments.
A Yankee historian who has written extensively about Babe Ruth said the new information seemed like a valuable addition to his story.
"It's amazing how people keep finding out things about these old topics," said Jim Reisler, an Irvington resident. People never lose interest in some of those "old topics," either, as evidenced by the sale last month of a cap worn by Babe Ruth for $328,000, a record.
"Ruth was such an irresistible personality, with the accomplishments to back it up, and he endures today in all kinds of ways," Reisler said.
Maloney, whose memorabilia-crammed office resembles a sports bar with a dentist chair stuck inside it, also came away with renewed respect for Ruth.
"I used to see him as a giant on the field; now I see him as a giant off the field," he said.
