8. Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth is remembered for his prodigious feats on the baseball diamond, and his equally prodigious appetite for life. During the heyday of his baseball career, the Roaring Twenties, Ruth knew every speakeasy and brothel in the cities which comprised the American League. Although he slowed down his partying near the end of his career, he continued to enjoy the good life well into retirement. He smoked heavily, both cigars and cigarettes. He posed for both White Owl Cigars and Raleigh Cigarettes for their advertising posters and magazine inserts, and used their products assiduously. In late 1946 he suffered recurring severe headaches, sore throat, and blurred vision. His doctors diagnosed a rare form of cancer, not of the throat as so often reported, but in his neck.
Ruth had a tumor which ran from his nasal passages to the base of his skull, surrounding the carotid artery. In the summer of 1947, Ruth received chemotherapy treatments, still experimental, in conjunction with the radiation treatments already underway. The particular chemotherapy offered to Ruth was based on the same compound as mustard gas, and had only been tested on mice before Ruth received it. Ruth became the first to receive the drug, as well as one of the first to receive chemotherapy and radiation in a combined, two-pronged approach, described to him as risky and potentially fatal. He approved the treatment, acknowledging that medical science could learn even should it fail for him. There was a brief improvement for a few weeks. Babe Ruth died of his cancer in August, 1948. In the 1950s the drug used on him, teropterin, became widely available.