Breaking Little Bones: Triumph and Trauma, the First Cures of Childhood Leukemia

In this profound, complex story, G. Bennett Humphrey, MD, PhD, chronicles his year on 2 East, a pediatric leukemia floor. Doctors are fighting a presumedmortality rate of 100 percent, but the cost of finding a cure weighs heavily on their hearts. The cure rate for the children of 2 East in 1964 will turn out to be 15 percent.

With almost no training in pediatrics and no experience with chemotherapy, the author confronts an entirely different world. From the beginning he is amazed by the strength of the mothers, the compassion of the nurses, and the admirable ways the children themselves cope with this devastating illness.

Breaking Little Bones combines the personal and the scientific in poignant moments. It is both an overview of the revolutionary medical progress made in treating acute lymphocytic leukemia in 1964 and an honest narrative of what it was like to be there. Humphrey knew these kids. He knew Todd, who loved words, and Polly, who held her bald head proudly. He formed a brotherly bond with his team members, and he had to figure out his own unique way to cope with the grief.

This transformative look into one of the most heartbreaking areas of medicine digs deep, revealing what we can learn about truly living from those facing an early death.

G. Bennett Humphrey, MD, PhD, completed his graduate studies in medicine and biochemistry at the University of Chicago. Following the events of this book, he retrained in pediatrics, with oncology and hematology as his subspecialties. He taught pediatric oncology at a number of universities, including as a visiting professor in Japan, Europe, and the United States.

Over his career Humphrey has written numerous articles and chapters and has edited several pediatric oncology books. In 2013 his chapbook entitled The Magpie Cried, containing poems about his youth, was published. That year he was named Senior Poet Laureate of Colorado. Three short stories from this book have been published previously, two by Whispering Angel Press and the other by Johns Hopkins University Press. Humphrey currently splits time between his apartment in Boulder, Colorado, and a cabin in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at ninety-three hundred feet, just north of the New Mexico border.