The Berkshire Hills Sanatorium was the largest private hospital in the nation for the treatment of cancer.
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — In case you don't recognize the title, it's an excerpt from the song "Disobedience" about James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree's mother.
Upon being advised repeatedly not to go down to the end of the town, she puts on her golden gown and goes there anyway. This prompts King John to put up a notice, "... lost, stolen or strayed / James James Morrison's mother, she seems to have been mislaid."
A jolly little ditty, but what has it to do with Hillside Cemetery? Not a thing, except that the subjects of this essay have also been mislaid.
According to the city's records, they were interred up on the south hill, in front of the Flood lot and across the road from the Wilkinson lot. And yet if you go up there, not only are they not there, neither is there any evidence that they ever were! Where are they? Alas! We'll probably never know. But who they were and the mark they left on North Adams is a tale well worth the telling; and the reading of.
We begin with an adolescent boy in upstate New York, circa 1844. This young man developed cancer of the palate and had to undergo surgery to have the tumor removed. When you consider just how little medicine doctors of his day actually knew — including the importance of washing their hands BEFORE operating on a patient and anything more than the barest basics of anesthesia — it is appalling to ponder what this surgery must have been like for the patient.
Mere pain doesn't come close. Even excruciating becomes just a word. Even so, he had his operation and survived it. But in time the cancer came back, resulting in the removal of his entire palate. These experiences had a profound effect on the young man's whole life. Indeed, he became a dentist with the specific goal of find a painless method of treating oral cancers. His name was William E. Brown.
He settled in North Adams in the 1850s, opened an office in the Fisher Block on Main Street and began his research. By 1878, he was beginning to have consistent success. When this happened, his son Wallace began expressing an interest. Like many ambitious boys of the day, Wallace had left school at 12 years old to go to work. Considered a rash — if not foolhardy — decision today, in those days a well-motivated (and lucky) lad could start as an office boy and work his way up into the presidency of a major corporation.
Exactly what Wallace Brown was doing is not known. What is known is that once his father began achieving a steady stream of cures, Wallace quit his job at the age of 24 and entered his father's office as a student. After a few months, he took his savings and moved to New York City, where he studied Medicine at Bellevue Hospital Medical School.
Today, when a young man or woman wants to be a doctor he or she takes four years of Pre-Med in college, followed by four years at a medical school, followed by four more in residency at a teaching hospital. To become a surgeon, the residency is eight years long. Then they go looking for work. In Wallace Brown's day, things were much simpler. A prospective doctor did not need a college degree — nor even be literate! Instead, he studied at a teaching hospital and then went to work under an established physician. When he had absorbed as much as his mentor could teach him, he could put out his own shingle.
By 1884, Wallace was licensed to practice medicine in New York City and it was there that his father called upon him with a bold proposal. His cancer had come back and he wanted his son to treat him — by his own methods.
The treatment took 16 months. At the end of that time, William was cancer free and remained so until his death (circa 1907). The two immediately returned to North Adams and set up shop together in William's Main Street office. In 1887, they expanded their growing practice into a newly built but unoccupied five-tenement block on the corner of Veazie and North streets. They named it the Berkshire Hills Sanatorium.
A sanatorium is not the same thing as a sanitarium. The latter is a hospital of sorts, but functions differently. People of wealth went to stay for months at a time at the Battle Creek San (short for sanitarium), where they ate a vegetarian diet, exercised and attempted to learn the superior way of living that Dr. John Harvey Kellogg touted as the key to a long, healthy life. A sanatorium with an O is a private hospital that treats a specific illness, such as tuberculosis or, as in this case, cancer.
At first, the Drs. Brown handled their overflow by building a number of bungalows for their patients to reside in during treatment. In 1894, they began work on a massive addition. Completed two years later, it was a palace of stunning size and appointment. It had its own pharmacy, its own laundry, two elevators — one for passengers and one for freight — offices, treatment rooms, two dining rooms, a kitchen with a 30-foot range and 40 suites of rooms, plus sun parlors on every floor and a five-story observation tower. Fresh flowers were provided daily by an adjacent greenhouse.
The Berkshire Hills Sanatorium was now the largest private hospital in the nation for the treatment of cancer.
So what was the treatment? The world would have to wait until 1906 to find out. In 1905, three momentous things happened. The first was that William Brown retired and moved back to his hometown in New York, remaining there until his death. He was allegedly brought back here to be buried. The second thing was that Wallace was elected president of the North Berkshire Medical Society. When this happened, he began to pay heed to the advice of his friends in the medical community.
From the earliest days of their partnership, William had been advertising in national newspapers and magazines, claiming they could cure cancer. Were they lying? I don't think so, but more on that in a bit. What offended Wallace's colleagues was that they didn't think it proper for a medical institution to advertise. In 1905, Wallace stopped the advertising. In 10 years time, the sanatorium would be virtually empty.
But in 1906, that was happily unknown and unsuspected. In that year, Wallace held an open house. Guests included members of the Berkshire and North Berkshire Medical Societies and an assortment of former patients. Following a tour of the hospital, Wallace gave a demonstration of his treatment. He called it the "Escharotic" method.
Escharotic is a fancy name for corrosives. In the initial treatment, the tumor was surrounded by a ring of petroleum jelly. Then a corrosive paste was applied to the tumor and the surrounding tissue. The active ingredient was lye. How is lye paste painless? Wallace compared it to the difference between having a red hot iron applied to the flesh and having a white iron so applied.
As crazy as this sounds, it actually makes sense. A red hot iron would be excruciatingly painful, but a white hot iron would destroy nerve endings on contact, thus alleviating the pain. Lye does the same thing.
Wallace — and his happy former patients — said the paste was uncomfortable, but not painful. They could treat any cancer of the skin, mouth or ... other orifices; as long as the patient didn't need to be cut open to get at the tumor.
Later treatments were applied only to the tumor, gradually dissolving it away. The affected area was then palpated (probed with the fingertips) to determine how much of the cancer remained. When no more tumor could be felt, a cure was declared. And by the standards of the day, this would have been accurate, so no, the ads were not lies.
But Wallace also said something worth remembering. He said that the cure was complete as long as the cancer was treated before it got into the lymphatic system, which he theorized was the way in which cancer was spread throughout the body; he urged particular research into this. His theory was proven in the 1930s by a young pathologist who had never heard of him.
Both medical societies were thrilled with the presentation and voted unanimously to keep a copy of the presentation in each of their archives and submit a third copy to the American Medical Journal for publication.
In 1907, Wallace began dabbling in local politics, getting elected to the City Council and 1913, to the office of mayor. He served three consecutive one-year terms. He is credited with beginning the major projects of building Drury High School and Mount Williams Reservoir.
In 1918, the city rented the sanatorium to use it as a clinic during the influenza pandemic. But the handwriting was already on the wall. With no advertising to alert doctors and patients of the sanatorium's existence and the treatment given there, business dried up. In 1919, Wallace declared bankruptcy and moved to New York City to become house physician at the Hotel Flanders, where he continued to treat cancer patients.
Hoosac Bank foreclosed on the mortgage in 1920 and took possession of the sanatorium. There was some talk of turning it into a luxury hotel, which would have made perfect sense as the Browns had spared no expense in its construction. But these plans fell through. On Oct 19, 1920, it was sold to the John F. Germain Co. of Pittsfield. Germain razed the building, intending to use the salvaged material to build houses on the site, so in a sense, the sanatorium may still be there today.
Upon his retirement in 1927, Wallace returned to North Adams and took up residence with his wife's family, the Stewarts, in Blackinton Village. He died in 1930 while visiting his son in Colorado. Like his father before him, he is supposed to have been brought back to North Adams for burial. Also like his father before him, he is conspicuous in his absence.
This series is an attempt to help us get to know a particular community of neighbors, without whose vision and efforts this city would not exist. These neighbors are the residents of Hillside Cemetery. As part of our effort to restore and maintain this, the city’s oldest municipal cemetery, we hope to generate interest, funding and volunteer labor in an effort to restore it. This work is an important step in maintaining our city's heritage and civic pride. But more than this, it's a way in which we can help our neighbors; neighbors who laid the foundations of North Adams and paved the way for us.
northadams.com welcomes critical, respectful dialogue. Name-calling, personal attacks, libel, slander or foul language is not allowed. All comments are reviewed before posting and will be deleted or edited as necessary.
MEMBER SIGN IN
The Berkshire Hills Sanatorium was the largest private hospital in the nation for the treatment of cancer.
