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.....He died on August 16, 1948, at age 53, by most accounts of throat cancer, brought on at least in part by a well-chronicled fondness for tobacco and liquor. But that's all wrong, says a Westchester County, N.Y., dentist with a passion for baseball history. And he's trying to set the record straight.

Dr. William Maloney spent a year researching the circumstances of Ruth's death, and the information he revealed in July's Journal of the American Dental Association about the Bambino's last days came as a surprise even to Ruth's closest living relative.

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Maloney uncovered little-known information about the experimental treatment that the doomed baseball titan agreed to take part in, the kindness Ruth showed toward medical staff during his difficult final days and the rare form of cancer he actually died from, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (it causes less than 1 percent of the cancer deaths in the U.S. today).

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"They completely skip over his illness, and they got it all wrong," Maloney says. "They all said he had throat cancer -- an easy conclusion because he was well-known for drinking, smoking and using tobacco. In fact, he died of a very rare cancer. And what I found out was that this larger-than-life celebrity was a pioneer in early cancer research."

Ruth agreed to take part in an experimental drug trial, one that had never been tried on humans. A number of doctors warned against it in an age when medical experimentation was far less regulated.