Until the mid-20th century, doctors could do little for children in cancer wards except try to comfort them. “There wasn’t much else you could do but care,” Audrey Evans recalled of the era when she began studying for a career as a pediatric oncologist.

The British-born doctor arrived in Boston in 1953 on a Fulbright scholarship to work at Boston Children’s Hospital with Sidney Farber, an oncologist who had begun to gain international recognition for his use of chemotherapy treatment. Children in his studies had managed to beat leukemia into remission — the first major victory over what had long been an almost universally fatal disease.