As a surgeon at the New York Cancer Hospital, Abbe regularly encountered patients suffering from squamous-cell carcinoma, a cancer that often manifests as a rapidly growing tumor or a persistent and expanding ulcer on the skin or inner surfaces of the digestive tract. When the tumor grew on the lips or other parts of the face, a surgeon like Abbe could cut it away, but the loss of tissue would leave the patient painfully disfigured. In fact, the purpose of the aforementioned “Abbe flap” was to reconstruct a patient’s mouth after removal of major portions of the lip. Carcinomas inside the body raised a different set of problems, since internal surgery of any kind carried serious risks for patients in the late nineteenth century. What patients and doctors needed was a way to shrink the carcinoma without having to physically hack at it with a knife or scalpel.

When doctors began to experiment with x-ray emitters in 1896, they discovered that x-rays could achieve just such an effect; many carcinomas seemed to melt away with repeated exposure. Therapists found it difficult, however, to control the frequency and strength of the radiation produced by x-ray emitters, and x-ray treatment, as a result, entailed a serious risk of burns or other harm both to patients—especially when doctors attempted to treat tumors inside the body—and to physicians. Moreover, the x-ray apparatus itself could be expensive and difficult to operate, requiring the physician to develop a secondary expertise in electrical tinkering.

When Henri Becquerel--pictured, to the right--discovered that uranium spontaneously produced an energy similar in many ways to x-rays, it seemed that radiation offered an apparent solution to these problems. Therapy with a natural energy-producing source would not require complicated tinkering or electrical apparatus; to irradiate a tumor, the physician could simply place a radioactive sample in close physical proximity to the cancer. Uranium, however, produced only relatively weak emissions. For therapeutic purposes, doctors needed something much stronger. That something would be radium--an element that was almost a million times more radioactive than uranium.