PROBLEM OF CANCER

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3261, 31 January 1931, Page 2

PROBLEM OF CANCER

QUESTION OF HEREDITY. The question whether cancer was hereditary was discussed by Mr. Lewis P. Orr, past-president of the Faculty of Actuaries and general manager of the Scottish Life Assurance Company, in an address at Edinburgh recently. At one time, Mr. Orr said, in dealing with the influence of heredity the physician gave a decided affirmative to the question—ls cancer hereditary? But life assurance research had helped by degrees to weaken that belief, until they had reached the stage at which they could state their conviction that when the cancer problem was solved it would probably be found that the influence of heredity if any was distinctly small and possibly negligible. Insurance research, he said, had enabled them to assist in removing the fear that darkens the lives of thousands in whose families cancer had appeared and who still shared the belief that the dreaded disease is hereditary in character. Mr. Orr said that with the passing of the old convival days of the “three bottle” men and the advent of a more temperate and athletic generation, the aristocratic ailment of gout was nowadays seldom to be met with in insurance work. Albuminura at one time practically barred a man from insurance, but it had for many years been known that it was often but a passing phase of no consequence. If

a football team were examined be-

fore a match probably not a single ' man would have a trace of albumen; after the match a number of them would have it as the passing and negligible result of hard exercise.

“Let me have about me men that

are fat,” Shakespeare made Julius Caesar say, but the modern actuary was reluctantly compelled to express a preference for the type of “spare Cassius,” because those of heavy weight had a heavy mortality. In the case of many who had a consumptive family history and were pursued by the fear that they might fall victims to the disease, they could say, especially to those who had passed the age of 30, that their longevity

depended mainly on themselves and that any hereditary tendency to tubercular disease could be largely counteracted by their observance of reasonable medical and hygienic requirements.