The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942 tragically claimed 490 lives, but was the catalyst for several important medical advances.
On the evening of November 28, 1942, more than 1,000 revelers from the Boston College-Holy Cross football game jammed into the Cocoanut Grove, Boston's oldest nightclub. When a spark from faulty wiring accidently ignited an artificial palm tree, the packed nightspot, which was only designed to accommodate about 500 people, was quickly engulfed in flames. In the ensuing panic, hundreds of people were trapped inside, with most exit doors locked. Bodies piled up by the only open entrance, jamming the exits, and 490 people ultimately died in the worst fire in the country in forty years.
"People couldn't get out," says Dr. Kenneth Marshall, a retired plastic surgeon in Boston and president of the Cocoanut Grove Memorial Committee. "It was a tragedy of mammoth proportions."
Within a half an hour of the start of the blaze, the Red Cross mobilized more than five hundred volunteers in what one newspaper called a "Rehearsal for Possible Blitz." The mayor of Boston imposed martial law. More than 300 victims—many of whom subsequently died--were taken to Boston City Hospital in one hour, averaging one victim every eleven seconds, while Massachusetts General Hospital admitted 114 victims in two hours. In the hospitals, 220 victims clung precariously to life, in agonizing pain from massive burns, their bodies ravaged by infection.
The scene of the fire.
Boston Public Library
Tragic Losses Prompted Revolutionary Leaps
But there is a silver lining: this horrific disaster prompted dramatic changes in safety regulations to prevent another catastrophe of this magnitude and led to the development of medical techniques that eventually saved millions of lives. It transformed burn care treatment and the use of plasma on burn victims, but most importantly, it introduced to the public a new wonder drug that revolutionized medicine, midwifed the birth of the modern pharmaceutical industry, and nearly doubled life expectancy, from 48 years at the turn of the 20th century to 78 years in the post-World War II years.
The devastating grief of the survivors also led to the first published study of post-traumatic stress disorder by pioneering psychiatrist Alexandra Adler, daughter of famed Viennese psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, who was a student of Freud. Dr. Adler studied the anxiety and depression that followed this catastrophe, according to the New York Times, and "later applied her findings to the treatment World War II veterans."
Dr. Ken Marshall is intimately familiar with the lingering psychological trauma of enduring such a disaster. His mother, an Irish immigrant and a nurse in the surgical wards at Boston City Hospital, was on duty that cold Thanksgiving weekend night, and didn't come home for four days. "For years afterward, she'd wake up screaming in the middle of the night," recalls Dr. Marshall, who was four years old at the time. "Seeing all those bodies lined up in neat rows across the City Hospital's parking lot, still in their evening clothes. It was always on her mind and memories of the horrors plagued her for the rest of her life."
The sheer magnitude of casualties prompted overwhelmed physicians to try experimental new procedures that were later successfully used to treat thousands of battlefield casualties. Instead of cutting off blisters and using dyes and tannic acid to treat burned tissues, which can harden the skin, they applied gauze coated with petroleum jelly. Doctors also refined the formula for using plasma--the fluid portion of blood and a medical technology that was just four years old--to replenish bodily liquids that evaporated because of the loss of the protective covering of skin.
"Every war has given us a new medical advance. And penicillin was the great scientific advance of World War II."
"The initial insult with burns is a loss of fluids and patients can die of shock," says Dr. Ken Marshall. "The scientific progress that was made by the two institutions revolutionized fluid management and topical management of burn care forever."
Still, they could not halt the staph infections that kill most burn victims—which prompted the first civilian use of a miracle elixir that was being secretly developed in government-sponsored labs and that ultimately ushered in a new age in therapeutics. Military officials quickly realized this disaster could provide an excellent natural laboratory to test the effectiveness of this drug and see if it could be used to treat the acute traumas of combat in this unfortunate civilian approximation of battlefield conditions. At the time, the very existence of this wondrous medicine—penicillin—was a closely guarded military secret.
From Forgotten Lab Experiment to Wonder Drug
In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered the curative powers of penicillin, which promised to eradicate infectious pathogens that killed millions every year. But the road to mass producing enough of the highly unstable mold was littered with seemingly unsurmountable obstacles and it remained a forgotten laboratory curiosity for over a decade. But Fleming never gave up and penicillin's eventual rescue from obscurity was a landmark in scientific history.
In 1940, a group at Oxford University, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, isolated enough penicillin to test it on twenty-five mice, which had been infected with lethal doses of streptococci. Its therapeutic effects were miraculous—the untreated mice died within hours, while the treated ones played merrily in their cages, undisturbed. Subsequent tests on a handful of patients, who were brought back from the brink of death, confirmed that penicillin was indeed a wonder drug. But Britain was then being ravaged by the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz, and there were simply no resources to devote to penicillin during the Nazi onslaught.
In June of 1941, two of the Oxford researchers, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, embarked on a clandestine mission to enlist American aid. Samples of the temperamental mold were stored in their coats. By October, the Roosevelt Administration had recruited four companies—Merck, Squibb, Pfizer and Lederle—to team up in a massive, top-secret development program. Merck, which had more experience with fermentation procedures, swiftly pulled away from the pack and every milligram they produced was zealously hoarded.
After the nightclub fire, the government ordered Merck to dispatch to Boston whatever supplies of penicillin that they could spare and to refine any crude penicillin broth brewing in Merck's fermentation vats. After working in round-the-clock relays over the course of three days, on the evening of December 1st, 1942, a refrigerated truck containing thirty-two liters of injectable penicillin left Merck's Rahway, New Jersey plant. It was accompanied by a convoy of police escorts through four states before arriving in the pre-dawn hours at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dozens of people were rescued from near-certain death in the first public demonstration of the powers of the antibiotic, and the existence of penicillin could no longer be kept secret from inquisitive reporters and an exultant public. The next day, the Boston Globe called it "priceless" and Time magazine dubbed it a "wonder drug."
Within fourteen months, penicillin production escalated exponentially, churning out enough to save the lives of thousands of soldiers, including many from the Normandy invasion. And in October 1945, just weeks after the Japanese surrender ended World War II, Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. But penicillin didn't just save lives—it helped build some of the most innovative medical and scientific companies in history, including Merck, Pfizer, Glaxo and Sandoz.
"Every war has given us a new medical advance," concludes Marshall. "And penicillin was the great scientific advance of World War II."
Dr. Robert Montgomery, almost one year post-transplant, at a vineyard in Casablanca, Chile, August 2019.
Having spent my working life as a transplant surgeon, it is the ultimate irony that I have now become a heart transplant patient. I knew this was a possibility since 1987, when I was 27 years old and I received a phone call from my sister-in-law telling me that my 35-year-old brother, Rich, had just died suddenly while water skiing.
Living from one heartbeat to the next I knew I had to get it right and nail my life—and in that regard my disease was a blessing.
After his autopsy, dots were connected and it was clear that the mysterious heart disease my father had died from when I was 15 years old was genetic. I was evaluated and it was clear that I too had inherited cardiomyopathy, a progressive weakening condition of the heart muscle that often leads to dangerous rhythm disturbances and sudden death. My doctors urged me to have a newly developed device called an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) surgically placed in my abdomen and chest to monitor and shock my heart back into normal rhythm should I have a sudden cardiac arrest.
They also told me I was the first surgeon in the world to undergo an ICD implant and that having one of these devices would not be compatible with the life of a surgeon and I should change careers to something less rigorous. With the support of a mentor and armed with what the British refer to as my "bloody-mindedness," I refused to give up this dream of becoming a transplant surgeon. I completed my surgical training and embarked on my career.
What followed were periods of stability punctuated by near-death experiences. I had a family, was productive in my work, and got on with life, knowing that this was a fragile situation that could turn on its head in a moment. In a way, it made my decisions about how to spend my time and focus my efforts more deliberate and purposeful. Living from one heartbeat to the next I knew I had to get it right and nail my life—and in that regard my disease was a blessing.
In 2017 while pursuing my passion for the outdoors in a remote part of Patagonia, I collapsed from bacterial pneumonia and sepsis. Unknowingly, I had brought in my lungs one of those super-bugs that you read about from the hospital where I worked. Several days into the trip, the bacteria entered my blood stream and brought me as close to death as a human can get.
I lay for nearly 3 weeks in a coma on a stretcher in a tiny hospital in Argentina, septic and in cardiogenic shock before stabilizing enough to be evaced to NYU Langone Hospital, where I was on staff. I awoke helpless, unable to walk, talk, or swallow food or drink. It was a long shot but I managed to recover completely from this episode; after 3 months, I returned to work and the operating room. My heart rebounded, but never back to where it had been.
Then, on the eve of my mother's funeral, I arrested while watching a Broadway show, and this time my ICD failed to revive me. There was prolonged CPR that broke my ribs and spine and a final shock that recaptured my heart. It was literally a show stopper and I awoke to a standing ovation from the New York theatre audience who were stunned by my modern recreation of the biblical story of Lazarus, or for the more hip among them, my real-life rendition of the resurrection of Jon Snow at the end of season 5 of Game of Thrones.
Against the advice of my doctors, I attended my mom's funeral and again tried to regain some sense of normalcy. We discussed a transplant at this point but, believe it or not, there is such a scarcity of organs I was not yet "sick enough" to get enough priority to receive a heart. I had more surgery to supercharge my ICD so it would be more likely to save my life the next time -- and there would be a next time, I knew.
As a transplant surgeon, I have been involved in some important innovations to expand the number of organs available for transplantation.
Months later in Matera, Italy, where I was attending a medical meeting, I developed what is referred to as ventricular tachycardia storm. I had 4 cardiac arrests over a 3-hour period. With the first one, I fell on to a stone floor and split my forehead open. When I arrived at the small hospital it seemed like Patagonia all over again. One of the first people I met was a Catholic priest who gave me the Last Rights.
I knew now was the moment and so with the help of one of my colleagues who was at the meeting with me and the compassion of the Italian doctors who supplied my friend with resuscitation medications and left my IV in place, I signed out of the hospital against medical advice and boarded a commercial flight back to New York. I was admitted to the NYU intensive care unit and received a heart transplant 3 weeks later.
Now, what I haven't said is that as a transplant surgeon, I have been involved in some important innovations to expand the number of organs available for transplantation. I came to NYU in 2016 to start a new Transplant Institute which included inaugurating a heart transplant program. We hired heart transplant surgeons, cardiologists, and put together a team that unbeknownst to me at the time, would save my life a year later.
It gets even more interesting. One of the innovations that I had been involved in from its inception in the 1990s was using organs from donors at risk for transmitting viruses like HIV and Hepatitis C (Hep C). We popularized new ways to detect these viruses in donors and ensure that the risk was minimized as much as possible so patients in need of a life-saving transplant could utilize these organs.
When the opioid crisis hit hard about four years ago, there were suddenly a lot of potential donors who were IV drug users and 25 percent of them were known to be infected with Hep C (which is spread by needles). In 2018, 49,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses. There were many more donors with Hep C than potential recipients who had previously been exposed to Hep C, and so more than half of these otherwise perfectly good organs were being discarded. At the same time, a new class of drugs was being tested that could cure Hep C.
I was at Johns Hopkins at the time and our team developed a protocol for using these Hep C positive organs for Hep C negative recipients who were willing to take them, even knowing that they were likely to become infected with the virus. We would then treat them after the transplant with this new class of drugs and in all likelihood, cure them. I brought this protocol with me to NYU.
When my own time came, I accepted a Hep C heart from a donor who overdosed on heroin. I became infected with Hep C and it was then eliminated from my body with 2 months of anti-viral therapy. All along this unlikely journey, I was seemingly making decisions that would converge upon that moment in time when I would arise to catch the heart that was meant for me.
Dr. Montgomery with his wife Denyce Graves, September 2019.
(Courtesy Montgomery)
Today, I am almost exactly one year post-transplant, back to work, operating, traveling, enjoying the outdoors, and giving lectures. My heart disease is gone; gone when my heart was removed. Gone also is my ICD. I am no longer at risk for a sudden cardiac death. I traded all that for the life of a transplant patient, which has its own set of challenges, but I clearly traded up. It is cliché, I know, but I enjoy every moment of every day. It is a miracle I am still here.