THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION

The American Medical Association was formed in 1846 but it wasn't until 1901 that a reorganisation enabled it to gain power over how medicine was practised throughout America. By becoming a confederation of state medical associations and forcing doctors who wanted to belong to their county medical society to join the state association, the AMA soon increased its membership to include a majority of physicians. Then, by accrediting medical schools, it began determin­ing the standards and practices of doctors. Those who refused to conform lost their licence to practise medicine.

Morris Fishbein was the virtual dictator of the AMA from the mid-1920s until he was ousted on June 6,1949 at the AMA convention in Atlantic City. But even after he was forced from his position of power because of a revolt from several state delegations of doctors, the policies he had set in motion continued on for many years. He died in the early 1970s.

A few years after the successful cancer clinic of 1934, Dr R. T. Hamer, who did not participate in the clinic, began to use the procedure in Southern California. According to Benjamin Cullen, who observed the entire development of the cancer cure from idea to implementation, Fishbein found out and tried to "buy in". When he was turned down, Fishbein unleashed the AMA to destroy the cancer cure. Cullen recalled:

"Dr Hamer ran an average of forty cases a day through his place. He had to hire two operators. He trained them and watched them very closely. The case histories were mounting up very fast.  Among them was this old man from Chicago. He had a malignancy all around his face and neck. It was a gory mass. Just terrible, just a red gory mass. It had taken over all around his face. It had taken on one eyelid at the bottom of the eye. It had taken off the bottom of the lower lobe of the ear and had also gone into the cheek area, nose and chin. He was a sight to behold."

"But in six months all that was left was a little black spot on the side of his face and the condition of that was such that it was about to fall off. Now that man was 82 years of age. I never saw anything like it. The delight of having a lovely clean skin again, just like a baby's skin."

"Well he went back to Chicago. Naturally he couldn't keep still and Fishbein heard about it.  Fishbein called him in and the old man was kind of reticent about telling him. So Fishbein wined and dined him and finally learned about his cancer treatment by Dr Hamer in the San Diego clinic."

"Well soon a man from Los Angeles came down. He had several meetings with us. Finally he took us out to dinner and broached the subject about buying it. Well we wouldn't do it.  The renown was spreading and we weren't even advertising. But of course what did it was the case histories of Dr Hamer. He said that this was the most marvellous development of the age. His case histories were absolutely wonderful"

"Fishbein bribed a partner in the company. With the result we were kicked into court—operating without a license. I was broke after a year."

In 1939, under pressure from the local medical society, Dr R. T. Hamer abandoned the cure. He is not one of the heroes of this story.

Thus, within the few, short years from 1934 to 1939, the cure for cancer was clinically demonstrated and expanded into curing other diseases on a daily basis by other doctors, and then terminated when Morris Fishbein of the AMA was not allowed to "buy in". It was a practice he had developed into a cold art, but never again would such a single mercenary deed doom millions of Americans to premature, ugly deaths. It was the AMA's most shameful hour.

Another major institution which 'staked its claim' in the virgin territory of cancer research in the 1930-1950 period was Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Established in 1884 as the first cancer hospital in America, Memorial Sloan-Kettering from 1940 to the mid-1950s was the centre of drug testing for the largest pharmaceutical companies. Cornelius P. Rhoads, who had spent the 1930s at the Rockefeller Institute, became the director at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 1939. He remained in that position until his death in 1959. Rhoads was the head of the chemical warfare service from 1943-1945, and afterwards became the nation's premier advocate of chemotherapy.

It was Dr Rhoads who prevented Dr Irene Diller from announcing the discovery of the cancer micro-organism to the New York Academy of Sciences m 1950. It also was Dr Rhoads who arranged for the funds for Dr Caspe's New Jersey laboratory to be cancelled after she announced the same discovery in Rome in 1953. An IRS investigation, instigated by an unidentified, powerful New York cancer authority, added to her misery, and the laboratory was closed.

Thus the major players on the cancer field are the doctors, the private research institutions, the pharmaceutical companies, the American Cancer Society, and also the US government through the National Cancer Institute (organising research) and the Food and Drug Administration (the dreaded FDA which keeps the outsiders on the defensive through raids, legal harassment, and expensive testing procedures).