By Robert Marchant

updated 5:42 p.m. ET Aug. 17, 2008

The story of Babe Ruth's bittersweet farewell at Yankee Stadium has been part of sports lore for generations. Shockingly stooped and frail, the slugger came to the Bronx ballpark on June 13, 1948, to put on the pinstriped uniform a last time and hear the roar of the faithful once more.

He died only two months later, on August 16, 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.

"I was stunned," says granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti. "It was the first I was reading that my grandfather did not have throat cancer. My mother, Dorothy, always thought it was throat cancer. So did the whole country."

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).

"I used to see him as a giant on the field," says Maloney, a longtime Yankees fan whose office resembles a sports bar with a dentist's chair in the middle. "Now I see him as a giant off the field."

As an assistant professor at the NYU College of Dentistry, Maloney, who co-wrote the article with an NYU colleague, was intrigued by Ruth's death after a visit to the Babe Ruth Museum in Baltimore. And although the exact cause of Ruth's death had been noted in the scientific community -- it was the subject of an article by a group of San Francisco doctors who turned up his autopsy results in 1998 -- biographies about Ruth all but missed it.

"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."

Slide show   The Week in Sports Pictures Manny messes up, the Tour takes off to Spain, Nomar returns and more. more photos

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.

Tosetti was pleased to learn from Maloney that the kind of cancer her grandfather died from isn't often related to tobacco and alcohol. Ruth's willingness to take part in a risky experimental treatment -- in effect to be a human guinea pig -- without any promise of success also came as welcome news.

"I want people to know that he was a humanitarian as well as the greatest slugger in baseball history," she says. "He gave to the very end."

MORE FROM BASEBALL

Baseball Section Front

Pitching makes Red Sox team to beat Howard fastest to reach 200 HRs in Phillies' win Live updates on Thursday's baseball games MLB blog: Mauer gets nod over Bartlett as MVP MLB blog: Who's NL MVP so far? Pujols ... by far MLB blog: Mets fans shouldn't care about Pedro MLB blog: Bay blogs about ‘weird’ interaction with Ichiro DeMarco: Plenty of potential trade-deadline action   Images: See the HR Derby, All-Star rosters Special feature: Top baseball All-Star moments Baseball Section Front   Add Baseball headlines to your news reader: