And then he wrote a letter. He sat down, and he wrote a letter, in which he said, to a colleague in Boston—he said, you know, “Puerto Rico is beautiful. The weather is incredible. I love the island. However, the problem is with the Puerto Ricans. They’re awful. They steal. They’re filthy. And the thing to do, really, is to totally exterminate the population.” And then he said, “And I’ve started that. I’ve killed eight of my patients, and I’ve sought to transplant cancer into 13 more. Hope you’re doing well in Boston. Yours sincerely,” and just signed off. We know that, because he then left the letter out. It was discovered. It was discovered by the Puerto Rican staff of the hospital where he was working. And it became a national scandal, understandably. Puerto Ricans had heard the scorn of mainlanders. They had heard talk of the problem of Puerto Rican overpopulation and how mainlanders disapproved of it. But here they saw what they interpreted to be the homicidal—racist, homicidal intent from a doctor who had actually killed eight people.

Cornelius Rhoads left. He just fled the island, hoping, presumably, that what happens in San Juan stays in San Juan. The government did an investigation. It uncovered another letter, which the governor deemed worse than the first. But the governor, who was appointed governor—he was a mainlander who had been appointed and not elected—suppressed that letter—we don’t have it, no researcher has ever seen it or found it—and concluded, after having suppressed evidence, that Cornelius Rhoads probably didn’t kill eight of his patients. He was probably just joking or something like that. And Cornelius Rhoads never faced a hearing.

Not only that, he didn’t even get fired. So he returned to New York. He continued his job. He was quickly—he quickly became the vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine. And then, during World War II, he became a colonel in the Army and became the chief medical officer in the Chemical Warfare Service. So, that’s not only a promotion. Just think about what that allows him to do, because the Chemical Warfare Service is preparing the United States to enter a gas war, if it comes to that. So, in order to do that, it tests out all kinds of poison gas, first on animals—goats are preferred—but ultimately on human subjects, on uniformed men, who are, without a lot of informed consent, either having mustard agents applied to their skin to see how their skin blisters, are put in gas chambers with gas masks to see how long they can stay in there—they’re locked in there until they falter—or, in a lot of cases, there’s an island that the United States uses off of Panama, San José Island. And men are put in the field, and they’re asked to sort of stage mock battles. But while they do that, they’re gassed from overhead. And then, you know, this is to see how they’re affected.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And interestingly, Professor Immerwahr, there were many Puerto Ricans who served in World War II who ended up stationed in Panama and being subjected to some of the mustard gas experiments that were conducted at that time. I know, because one of my uncles, who served in the 65th Infantry, was in Panama and was subjected to those experiments. So, the interesting thing, though, is that Cornelius Rhoads remained a major figure—didn’t he?—in the medical world, and way up into only recently. Only in recent years has there been an attempt to sort of revise or reform the image of him in the medical community.

DANIEL IMMERWAHR: That’s exactly right. So, after overseeing these medical experiments with gas, in which 60,000 uniformed men, a lot of them Puerto Rican, were subjected, without informed consent, to chemical weapons. And many of them suffered debilitating effects as a result of this—emphysema, eye damage, genital scarring, psychological damage. Some of these men were really harmed by this. Nevertheless, that also didn’t impede him. And, in fact, some of that work with chemical agents alerted him, as well as some other doctors, to the possibility that mustard agents could be used to treat cancer. Cornelius Rhoads took some of the surplus stock of U.S. chemical weapons after the war and became the first director of the Sloan Kettering Institute and then used his position to sort of launch the, you know, turn to chemotherapy and tried chemical after chemical after chemical out on fighting cancer.

The incredible thing is that, within the U.S. medical community, that’s what he was remembered for. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. There was an award given by the American Association of Cancer Research after Cornelius Rhoads, and that award was given for more than 20 years, before a Puerto Rican cancer researcher pointed out to the AACR, “You know the guy, after whom this award is named, the hero, Cornelius Rhoads? You know what he did in Puerto Rico?” And it had been 23 years. The informational segregation had been so extraordinary that it had been 23 years before the mainland medical community realized that the guy that they had been enthusiastically celebrating had at least said in a letter that he had killed eight of his patients.

AMY GOODMAN: And the statue of Cornelius Rhoads at 103rd and 5th Avenue was removed.