CANCER

New Zealand Mail, 29 January 1902, Page 61

CANCER

f At every stage of tlio world’a history .Ws powers have been limited by his K 5 all the arts, what a man effects determine by which he has access; and it is u*. o be wondered at that, with the new hacteriology to hand as a means of m- . and with the new surgery I available as a means of treatment the I men of to-day should have applied these 6 »tools” to the great problem of cancer. I rhus it is that investigators are just 1 now chiefly engaged in hammering out S the question of infection, and that exI tirpation is the keynote of all that con- § cerns the treatment of the disease. At I ' the present moment these are the lines I doner which progress is being chiefly I made; but that is because it is along I these lines that the new means now at | our disposal make it 'most easy to adI yance. We must not, then, speak with | positiveness, or assert that this, will be | t ] ie direction which the great discovery I w jn take—when at last the man shall | arise to point the way. | That cancer is infective within' the J of the patient who is attacked by the disease is obvious enough; in fact, | it is from its well-recognised tendency i to eat its way into surrounding tissues f and to affect distant organs that it has ; ‘ gained its name as a ‘‘malignant” disease, and for a long time men have I suspected that cancer might be infacf tious also from man to man. During recent years a considerable number of observations have been collected which go to show not only that cancer is far more prevalent ill some districts than in others, but that the disease so persistently haunts certain houses as to give “infectionists” a strong basis for i their faith. It is to be noted, however, [ that all these well-authenticated cases f of “cancer houses” or “cancer localities,” and all the instances in which successive

cases of cancer have occurred among people living together would be equally I well explained on the hypothesis which has been put forward by Mr. D’Arcy | Power to the effect that the germ of the disease is not a thing transferable directly from man to man, but is a

contagion vivum which lives in some | intermediate host, be it animal or vege-

| table, from which under certain favourj ing conditions it finds its way to a spoilsuitable for its growth in the body of || • its human victim. | As for treatment, the pointing hand I of science is much more certain, f Whether the stimulus to that epithelial overgrowth and invasion which is the characteristic feature of cancer be a parasite or some other irritation, or indeed be merely a defect of the tissues by which epithelial intrusion ought to be prevented, the fact remains that it is a local affair at first. What modern surgery teaches is that, if the local mischief can but be removed early and thoroughly enough, the patient may live on without recurrence to the term of his natural life; and thus, pending the time when the pathologists shall throw some light upon the nature of cancer, our sole a,nd whole duty as' practitioners in regard to it is to discover the disease as early as we can, and then remove it without delay.—The “Hospital.”