By the late 1950s, Farber was bristling with a fiery brand of optimism. Yet visitors to the Jimmy Fund clinic in the mid-1950s might have witnessed a more nuanced and complex reality. For Sonja Goldstein³⁰⁹, whose two-year-old son, David, was treated with chemotherapy for Wilms’ tumor in 1956, the clinic seemed perpetually suspended between two poles—both “wonderful and tragic . . . unspeakably depressing and indescribably hopeful.” On entering the cancer ward, Goldstein would write later, “I sense an undercurrent of excitement, a feeling (persistent despite repeated frustrations) of being on the verge of discovery, which makes me almost hopeful.

      “We enter a large hall decorated with a cardboard train along one wall. Half way down the ward is an authentic-looking stop sign, which can flash green, red, and amber lights. The train’s engine can be climbed into and the bell pulled. At the other end of the ward is a life-size gasoline pump, registering amount sold and price. . . . My first impression is one of overweening activity, almost snake pit-like in its intensity.”

      It was a snake-pit—only of cancer, a seething, immersed box coiled with illness, hope, and desperation. A girl named Jenny, about four years old, played with a new set of crayons in the corner. Her mother, an attractive, easily excitable woman, kept Jenny in constant sight, holding her child with the clawlike intensity of her gaze as Jenny stooped to pick up the colors. No activity was innocent here; anything might be a sign, a symptom, a portent. Jenny, Goldstein realized, “has leukemia and is currently in the hospital because she developed jaundice. Her eyeballs are still yellow”—presaging fulminant liver failure. She, like many of the ward’s inhabitants, was relatively oblivious to the meaning of her illness. Jenny’s only concern was an aluminum teakettle to which she was deeply attached.

      “Sitting in a go-cart in the hall is a little girl, who, I think at first, has been given a black eye. . . . Lucy, a 2-year old, suffers from a form of cancer that spreads to the area behind the eye and causes hemorrhaging there. She is not a very attractive child, and wails almost incessantly that first day. So does Debbie, an angelic-looking 4-year old whose face is white and frowning with suffering. She has the same type of tumor as Lucy—a neuroblastoma. Alone in a room lies Teddy. It takes many days before I venture inside it, for, skeleton-thin and blinded, Teddy has a monstrosity for a face. His tumor, starting behind the ear, has engulfed one side of his head and obliterated his normal features. He is fed through a tube in the nostril, and is fully conscious.”

      Throughout the ward were little inventions and improvisations, often devised by Farber himself. Since the children were usually too exhausted to walk, tiny wooden go-carts were scattered about the room so that the patients could move around with relative freedom. IV poles for chemotherapy were strung up on the carts to allow chemo to be given at all times during the day. “To me,” Goldstein wrote, “one of the most pathetic sights of all that I have seen is the little go-cart, with the little child, leg or arm tightly bandaged to hold needle in vein, and a tall IV pole with its burette. The combined effect is that of a boat with mast but no sail, helplessly drifting alone in a rough, uncharted sea.”

      Every evening, Farber came to the wards, forcefully driving his own sail-less boat through this rough and uncharted sea. He paused at each bed, taking notes and discussing the case, often barking out characteristically brusque instructions. A retinue followed him: medical residents, nurses, social workers, psychiatrists, nutritionists, and pharmacists. Cancer, he insisted, was a total disease—an illness that gripped patients not just physically, but psychically, socially, and emotionally. Only a multipronged, multidisciplinary attack would stand any chance of battling this disease. He called the concept “total care.”

      But despite all efforts at providing “total care,” death stalked the wards relentlessly. In the winter of 1956, a few weeks after David’s visit, a volley of deaths hit Farber’s clinic. Betty, a child with leukemia, was the first to die. Then it was Jenny, the four-year-old with the aluminum teakettle. Teddy, with retinoblastoma, was next. A week later, Axel, another child with leukemia, bled to death, with hemorrhages in his mouth. Goldstein observed, “Death assumes shape, form, and routine. Parents emerge from their child’s room, as they have perhaps done periodically for days for short rests. A nurse takes them to the doctor’s small office; the doctor comes in and shuts the door behind him. Later, a nurse brings coffee. Still later, she hands the parents a large brown paper bag, containing odds and ends of belongings. A few minutes later, back at our promenade, we note another empty bed. Finish.”

      In the winter of 1956, after a prolonged and bruising battle, Sonja’s son, three-year-old David Goldstein, died of metastatic Wilms’ tumor at the Jimmy Fund clinic, having spent the last few hours of his life delirious and whimpering under an oxygen mask. Sonja Goldstein left the hospital carrying her own brown paper bag containing the remains of her child.

      But Farber was unfazed. The arsenal of cancer chemotherapy, having been empty for centuries, had filled up with new drugs. The possibilities thrown open by these discoveries were enormous: permutations and combinations of medicines, variations in doses and schedules, trials containing two-, three-, and four-drug regimens. There was, at least in principle, the capacity to re-treat cancer with one drug if another had failed, or to try one combination followed by another. This, Farber kept telling himself with hypnotic conviction, was not the “finish.” This was just the beginning of an all-out attack.

      In her hospital bed on the fourteenth floor, Carla Reed was still in “isolation”—trapped in a cool, sterile room where even the molecules of air arrived filtered through dozens of sieves. The smell of antiseptic soap pervaded her clothes. A television occasionally flickered on and off. Food came on a tray labeled with brave, optimistic names—Chunky Potato Salad or Chicken Kiev—but everything tasted as if it had been boiled and seared almost to obliteration. (It had been; the food had to be sterilized before it could enter the room.) Carla’s husband, a computer engineer, came in every afternoon to sit by her bed. Ginny, her mother, spent the days rocking mechanically in a chair, exactly as I had found her the first morning. When Carla’s children stopped by, in masks and gloves, she wept quietly, turning her face toward the window.

      For Carla, the physical isolation of those days became a barely concealed metaphor for a much deeper, fiercer loneliness, a psychological quarantine even more achingly painful than her actual confinement. “In those first two weeks, I withdrew into a different person,” she said. “What went into the room and what came out were two different people.

      “I thought over and over again about my chances of surviving through all this. Thirty percent. I would repeat that number to myself at night. Not even a third. I would stay up at night looking up

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