Quill & Parchment:Part 11: Why the Willow Weeps

Part 11: Why the Willow Weeps
by Jonathan Shute

Janice started writing the letters anonymously at first. She wrote to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and
Johns Hopkins in Baltimore using names and addresses that she gleaned from the daily newspaper. She
scrutinized the papers each day for word of the discovery of a radical new cancer treatment but saw no
evidence that her letters had ever been received, much less taken seriously. Several months elapsed with
no progress in her secret willow tree campaign, when the fates added a new urgency to her mission. She
attributed her frequent headaches and sleepless nights to stress over the odd turn her life had taken but
they were in fact the first symptoms of her own cancerous tumor.

Janice assumed the role of cancer patient and abandoned her nursing career in favor of full-time letter writing.
She could now speak with some personal authority on the limitations of radiation and chemotherapy. The
traditional remedies seemed to be killing her quicker than the cancer and her rapid deterioration redoubled her
resolve to betray the willow's secret.

With the clock ticking in the background she had less to fear for being thought a kook so she signed the next batch
of letters with her real name and provided a return address. This time she wrote to Universities with prominent medical
schools and teaching hospitals and the response was deafening. Her credentials as a nurse in a cancer ward got the
letters opened and read. The earnest appeal to investigate the willow tree as a cancer cure piqued the interest of
researchers who had only recently stumbled on the potential truth of her claim.

The healing powers of salicin, from the bark of the willow tree had long been recognized. It is the willow that gave
us the miracle drug aspirin. There was nothing revolutionary in the idea that a tree might provide the cure for disease
and the willow tree in particular was less than a radical offering.

It was, however, only very recently that the bark of the venerated willow was the target of cancer research and it was
unlikely that this nurse would have been privy to the guarded data. The first trial of a substance called combretastatin,
from the bark of the African Bush Willow, had shown a remarkable efficiency in starving cancerous tumors of oxygen,
strangling them out of existence without damage to neighboring tissue.

Janice's correspondence raised some eyebrows in the competitive research community because the most recent was
postmarked three weeks before the publication of papers on that very topic. The series in the medical journal offered
preliminary research results that warranted expanded study of the willow bark as a cancer remedy.

It's just as well that she passed away before they involved her in the tug of war over bragging rights to the discovery.
A half dozen Universities were prepared to pay Janice's expenses to secure an interview but she was, by that time, far
too ill to travel. Before they could visit her bedside, she was gone. Controversy hovered briefly when a local paper made
the minor scandal public but was quickly quieted with a stroke of posthumous diplomacy.

As an academic compromise, Janice's name was added to the authorship of the research papers.

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