Robert was assisted in his radium experiments by his nephew, Truman Abbe; Truman had received his M.D. from Columbia University in 1899 and joined Abbe's practice after a post-graduate stint in Europe. Truman kept casebooks with notes about the pair's early radium experiments and eventually typed up his notes to produce the records seen here (view the full item record to see additional pages of case notes).

Of the nine cases recorded in these notes, eight were explicitly designated as cancers, and the other case, designated as "lupus vulgaris," was probably also a cancerous growth. Two of the patients had cervical cancer, five (plus the "lupus" case) had growths on the jaw, lip, or face, and one had rectal cancer. In every case, the experimental treatment consisted of placing a small container of radioactive material--sometimes described as a "bulb" or "tube"--in close proximity to the tumor. The sample would remain in place for a period ranging from a few minutes to fifteen hours. Some patients received daily treatment; others came in a few times a week or just a few times a month. The Abbes only had a few radium samples, which they repeatedly reused; all the patients receiving treatment with "radium 300,000" were probably being treated with the same tube of radium bromide. A few patients also received x-ray treatments.

Reading over these notes reveals some of the many challenges faced by would-be radium therapists. Some were mundane; at the bottom of the first page, a note describes how the radium tube, which had been held in place by packed cloth, had fallen out of place. On the second page, a short entry describes a patient breaking the glass tube that had been placed in her mouth to treat a carcinoma in her jaw. Although the patient reported a "gritty feeling and bitter taste," she "kept on using tube full of saliva" for the next two days. The patient with rectal cancer apparently put an abrupt end to treatment to return home to Baltimore.