G.B. was a master mariner (sailor), age 32. When he began receiving Coley's Toxins in 1926, he had only one leg.
Seven years earlier, while on a voyage to England, he'd been thrown against a hatch and bruised his lower left leg. The injured spot never healed and caused him pain over the years. After a long and complicated medical course, histiocytic lymphoma—a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma—was eventually discovered in the leg. (This disease was formerly known as reticulum cell sarcoma.)
In 1933, Mrs. G.L, age 38, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, went to see her doctor. She’d lost 15 pounds in the previous 6 months. She was fatigued. A fullness in her lower abdomen troubled her.
In 1891, Mrs. R. Gruver, a 41-year-old woman in the small town of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, began to experience pain in her lower abdomen. Over the next two years, her symptoms—vomiting, headaches, and so forth—gradually worsened, and by May 1893, she checked in to the New York Hospital.