Bergen doctor made a groundbreaking discovery on the front lines of WWII

The son of a popular Park Ridge physician, Stewart Alexander dreamed of following his father into the medical field. Little did he know that once there, he would sow the seeds of an entirely new branch of medicine.

His father, Samuel, a borough mayor turned county commissioner who helped establish Bergen’s first sanatorium, set a strong example. Yet, young Alexander surpassed most anyone’s expectations — even his own.

Alexander was just 15 when he arrived at Dartmouth College. After three years, he gained early admission to the medical school, where he spent two years before he left in 1935 to earn a medical degree at Columbia University. At age 22, he embarked on his internship at Bellevue Hospital, training in chest diseases and neurology.

Before he turned 24, his dream of becoming a practicing doctor was achieved. Alexander gained a spot on the staff at Bellevue, joined his father’s practice and in 1940 became an instructor at New York University School of Medicine.

He didn't know it, but a nightmare was on the horizon.

In November 1940, with war raging in western Europe and the Mediterranean, Alexander entered military service. The decision was almost inevitable, said author Jennet Conant, who has written five books about World War II.

“He came from this principled, service-minded family,” she said. “His father had been an immigrant and was enormously grateful to his country.”

Once in the Army, Alexander worked as a research fellow in Maryland’s Edgewood Arsenal, the home of the military’s Chemical Warfare Service. There, he designed glasses that would better fit inside gas masks. He also learned the ins-and-outs of chemical warfare response.

A captain in the U.S. Army by July 1941, Alexander was promoted to lieutenant colonel in October 1943. Two months later, on the evening of Dec. 2, 1943, German forces bombed the packed Allied port in Bari, Italy. Thousands of soldiers died, as did hundreds of civilians. Seventeen boats sank, including the American military cargo ship John Harvey.

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Only a few high-ranking Allied officials knew the horrors the ship held, said Conant. Those who didn’t — or didn’t want to admit it — sent Alexander, then stationed in Algiers, to investigate the slow, deaths of many bombing survivors. Once there, he was British officials pressured Alexander to ignore reality, Conant said. Still, he couldn't do that.

“The one or two people who should have triggered an alarm, they didn’t,” she said. “And Alexander wasn’t about to disregard the situation.”

Amid the war zone, Alexander took detailed notes as part of a thorough examination. He combed through the status and symptoms of each victim and compiled a detailed report. In the four weeks after the blast, he documented more than 600 poisonings among military personnel, including 83 deaths. He credited them all to mustard gas — though the military would delete any mention of it from their medical charts, Conant said.

“While there undoubtedly may have been some elements of blast in many of these cases, the significant and the fatal factor was the exposure to mustard,” Alexander wrote.

Unknown to Alexander, the John Harvey had held a secret cargo of 2,000 mustard gas bombs to be used by Allied forces for retaliation in the event of a chemical attack against them. British and American officials quickly classified Alexander’s report, fearing it could spur a chemical attack from the Germans or otherwise disrupt ongoing planning for D-Day, Conant said.

The report nonetheless made its mark. Among the few who had access to the classified report was Cornelius "Dusty" Rhoads, who served as a U.S. Army colonel during World War II. The head of Memorial Hospital for Cancer Research in New York, Rhoads recognized Alexander’s observations on the toxic impact of mustard on white blood cells as groundbreaking.

In her 2020 book, "The Great Secret," Conant describes how Alexander's work inspired key players in the founding of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and the advent of chemotherapy; doctors there used a mustard-related agent called mustine as a treatment.

“Without a doubt, [the report] accelerated the work in chemotherapy by 10 or 20, 25 years or more,” Conant said. “The fact that Colonel Rhoads used it to found Sloan-Kettering, there’s simply no way to calculate how many hundreds of thousands or millions of lives he saved.”

After he was discharged in June 1945, Alexander declined an offer to join the fledgling cancer institute. Instead, he rejoined civilian life, married Lt. Col. Bernice “Bunny” Wilbur and continued the family practice in Park Ridge. He joined Columbia University’s faculty and worked at Pascack Valley Hospital and Bergen Pines County Hospital, where he was director of medicine from 1957 to 1974, and consulted at East Orange VA Hospital. He and Wilbur raised two daughters, Diane and Judith.

In 1988, 45 years after the attack on Bari, U.S. Army officials issued Alexander an official military commendation. Former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley and others pushed for his recognition after the U.S. declassified the report, The Ridgewood News reported.

Alexander’s service “reflects the finest measure of a soldier and physician,” the commendation reads. “Without his early diagnosis and rapid initiation of appropriate and aggressive treatment, many more lives would have been lost and the severity of injuries would have been much greater.”

Alexander died at 77 on Mustique, a posh private island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The former president of the Bergen County Medical Society and the New Jersey Academy of Medicine had skin cancer, according to his New York Times obituary.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bergen doctor's WWII discovery inspired advent of chemotherapy