CAUSE OF CANCER.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1218, 29 August 1911, Page 6

CAUSE OF CANCER.

DOCTORS DECIDE THAT DISEASE IS NOT CATCHING. Sir William Church, the eminent physician, announced on July 2U at the annual meeting or the Cancer Jieseareh Fund that "the reluticnsJiip that cancer bears to the animal in which it occurs is an individual one." In plain words, that cancer is "not catching'' and "cancer hviiacs" cannot exist. The repuri of Dr. llashford, the general superintendent of the fund, for the first time fully demonstrates it is wrong to make statements of a. disquieting nature about tho increase of cancer in general. Cancer is caused by chronic irritation of any particular part of tho body. Thus in Tibet malignant growths of the abdominal wall arc caused, by the continual wearing of vessels containing hot charcoal, and in the East the chewing of hotel-nut occasions cancer. In China the men are very liable to cancer of the gullet, but in women tho disease is unknown, the icason being that the men bolt their rice when it is very hot, being served first, while the women have to waif, and then the rice is cool and non-irritating.

'The report of Dr. Bashford concludes with a comforting paragraph on the healing of cancer. A considerable,number of cases of natural, healing of spontaneous malignant now growths have now been observed in mice affected with cancer. Tliis has been observed m. human beings. The changes leading to natural euro in mice appear to depend nu an altered condition of the caiieov tells and their contents rather than on an alloration in the general condition or constitution of the affected animal. We thus have reason to look with confidence to .science for mean?! to elucidate ftip nature of these changes in the cancer colls and thus discover curative measures for cancer, the most fatal of maladies.