CANCER.

Feilding Star, Volume XXIII, Issue 119, 16 November 1901, Page 2

CANCER.

» One can hardly have a doubt that many of the diseases with which man is afflicted are connected in some more or less vague and mysterious manner with the food he eats. It is the penalty we pay for being guided by intellect rather than instinct. In the course of ages, by dint of the stability of their surroundings, animals develop an instinct in regard to their food which tells them unerringly what to eat and what to avoid. Man, however, is always surrounding himself with new conditions. Looking at the matter from a purely evolutionary standpoint, the wonder isjthat he survives at all. To heat and cold, to tropics and to arctic regions he tries to accustom himself, while as regards diet he takes his chance at all that offers. Meat and vegetables, fruits and nuts, fish and fowls ; fresh, preserved, dried in the sun, baked in ovens, boiled down and condensed, sealed up in tins and jars of every description, and in latter years pickled in every deleterious antiseptic that the ingenuity of the chemist can invent. We need hardly wonder then that man is somewhat less hardy than animals which are more perfectly fitted to their more stable environment, and that the complete alteration of all the conditions of man's life which have been suddenly introduced by the invention of the steam engine— by which not only is man carried rapidly to all parts of the world, but the products of all parts of the world are brought to man, and placed without more ado upon his breakfast table — should have had the effect of strewing man's trail with a considerable number of failures, losses from consumption, from insanity, from fevers of all kinds, and from cancer. Whatever may be the immediate cause of cancer, we can hardly doubt that it has of late years shown a tendency to increase, or that this increase has especially affected the v progressive " nations, those in which all the old habits and associations, especially in regard to locality and food, have been subjected to a violent process of topsy-turveydom. The old natural conditions in the midst of which different men and different races grew up, each in his or its own native air have been shaken up, and injurious influences which in former times might have affected villagers or small communities, or might by their deleterous effects have mapped out certain districts as unfit for human habitation, have been so widely spread by trucks and steamships as to introduce new and unknown conditions into the lives of thousands in distant parts of the world, conditions against which man, whose intellect has to a large extent destroyed his extinct, has not the natural protection of that " brute instinct ," which is the attribute of the animal creation in a state of nature.