The history of cancer hospitals in New York City is a story of reinvention. Scientific breakthroughs, philanthropic vision, and a relentless commitment to patients transformed cancer from an often-fatal diagnosis into a disease that can increasingly be treated, managed, and cured. From pioneering hospitals and early research efforts to today's precision medicine, each generation built upon the last, and the forthcoming Tisch Cancer Hospital represents the future.
For much of the nineteenth century, cancer occupied a unique place in New York City’s moral landscape. It was more than just a badly understood disease. It often carried a stigma of fear, uncertainty, and almost certain mortality. Then, in 1884, Ulysses S. Grant, the former president and Union general, became gravely ill with throat cancer in an Upper East Side brownstone. Newspapers chronicled his decline, and cancer entered the headlines and the population’s awareness.
As New Yorkers observed the final months of Ulysses S. Grant’s battle with throat cancer, a significant development was occurring across town on the semi-rural Upper West Side. A group of civic leaders and philanthropists were laying the cornerstone for the New York Cancer Hospital at West 106th Street. This would be the first hospital in the United States dedicated exclusively to cancer care.
Designed by Charles Coolidge Haight in the style of a French château, the New York Cancer Hospital seemed at first glance to belong more to romance than to medicine with mansard roofs, conical turrets, and round towers overlooking Central Park. Its architecture was not merely theatrical, however. The circular wards reflected nineteenth-century ideas about minimizing stagnant air and maximizing light by eschewing corners. The building itself embodied a belief in the healing power of the environment.
Across town, The Mount Sinai Hospital was following a different but equally important path as it settled into its first few decades. It was founded as the Jews’ Hospital in 1852 by a group of philanthropists to treat New York’s immigrant and underserved poor. The Mount Sinai Hospital was not built for a single disease; it functioned as a community hospital shaped by the high demands of a diverse and vulnerable population. Its mission was rooted in the commitment to serve those whom other institutions might exclude, and that included patients with cancer. Decades before the New York Cancer Hospital was established, Mount Sinai was already treating cancer patients in its general wards. At a time when cancer was widely seen as incurable, Mount Sinai’s mission and ethos represented a bold alternative: a belief that compassionate care, clinical observation, and surgical innovation could push beyond the perceived limits of medicine.
By the early twentieth century, the history of cancer care was changed drastically by philanthropy and a newly discovered element when mining engineer James Douglas, mourning the death of his daughter from recurrent breast cancer, donated his share of radium holdings to Memorial Hospital in 1917. By 1926, Memorial possessed so much of the element—one of the largest holdings in the world—that it earned the nickname “Radium Hospital.” In its basement, scientists filled tiny gold tubes with radioactive gas, helping contribute to the rise of brachytherapy. Marie Curie herself visited the radium vault.
The first half of the twentieth century saw increasing breakthroughs emerging across the city in general hospitals and through tenacious efforts. A doctor at what is now New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Georgios Papanicolaou, MD, PhD, introduced a simple smear test in 1928, the Pap smear, for early detection of cervical cancer. Presbyterian Hospital opened one of the first cancer clinics within a general hospital in 1932. In 1945 the Sloan-Kettering Institute was established, later to unite with Memorial, and became a formative addition to cancer treatment that is well-known today: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. These advances in cancer care across New York City represented an ecosystem that was crowded, competitive, philanthropic, multicultural, and driven to advance the understanding and treatment of the disease.
Mount Sinai was integral to this ecosystem of health care writ large, and to advancing cancer care and research specifically. After World War II, Mount Sinai became one of the original Cancer Chemotherapy Service Centers of the National Institutes of Health, with an emphasis on leukemia trials. Then in the 1950s, an oncologist and researcher at Mount Sinai, Ezra M. Greenspan, MD, advocated for the controversial idea that multiple chemotherapy drugs could yield results that single agents could not. By the early 1960s, Dr. Greenspan’s landmark publications in the Journal of The Mount Sinai Hospital helped pioneer the emerging field of combination chemotherapy.
Mount Sinai’s modern cancer research began to take clearer shape in this period. In 1957, at the Sloan Kettering Institute, microbiologist Charlotte Friend, PhD, discovered a virus that causes leukemia in mice, which reinforced the once-radical idea that viruses could trigger cancers. By 1970, Mount Sinai formally established a Department of Neoplastic Diseases and recruited James F. Holland, MD, a physician-scientist already recognized as a founding father of medical oncology, to lead it. Dr. Holland promoted a culture of aggressive clinical trials, cooperative research, and multidisciplinary approaches. The Hospital participated in trials that advanced treatment for various malignancies, including lymphoma and breast cancer, and opened the Derald H. Ruttenberg Treatment Center, a 53-bed chemotherapy unit located in Mount Sinai’s Guggenheim Pavilion. This center essentially functioned as a hospital within a hospital, providing the dedicated space, staffing, and focus necessary for effective cancer care.
In the twenty-first century, Mount Sinai’s cancer story entered a new chapter with the creation of the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Institute (now the Tisch Cancer Center) in 2008 thanks to the generosity of James H. and Merryl S. Tisch, EdD. The Institute unified research, clinical care, recruitment, philanthropy, and ambition under a single cancer-focused initiative. Over the following decade, research programs, clinical trials, community outreach, and training efforts expanded. By 2025, it was designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the highest honor the national body confers, making Mount Sinai one of only 58 institutions to achieve Comprehensive Cancer Center status at that time, and in the top 1 percent of cancer centers nationwide.
As the Tisch Cancer Center grew, Mount Sinai began planning something pivotal on its main campus: a single, dedicated cancer hospital. To be located on Madison Avenue, the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Hospital represents both a new building and a historical echo. Like the city’s first cancer center, which believed in natural light and the healing power of the environment, the new Tisch Cancer Hospital promises openness in its space, as well as through advanced care, research, prevention, wellness, and the collaboration of multidisciplinary teams within a single modern environment.
The history of cancer hospitals in New York encompasses more than radium vaults, chemotherapy regimens, and modern research facilities. It also traces an evolution in how cancer is understood and treated—from stigma and isolation toward openness, collaboration, and comprehensive care. The Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Hospital carries that history forward, bringing advanced care, research, prevention, wellness, and multidisciplinary expertise together in a setting designed around the needs of patients. In this next chapter, Mount Sinai’s founding commitment to compassionate care converges with its long tradition of scientific discovery—and with the enduring belief that progress in medicine is measured by the difference it makes in people’s lives.
