WHAT CANCER IS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17345, 27 September 1924, Page 25

WHAT CANCER IS.

! j ANARCHIST OF THE BODY. I he student of cancer iinds himself, be tore his studios have advanced verv far. contemplating a stale of matters which hears at least a superficial resemblance. to some, of the political and economic development" of tlm present day.' says the 4 • Ivlinburtrh Review. ' " He. Is eon I rented on the. one hand j tain very huge purposes; on the other. 1 by groups ot individuals who have fnr- ; saken the larger purpose aml ate j concerned only with th mu solvcs. 1 Ihe earn er cell is the supreme | example of an anarchist. Like most, i anarchists, it lives in a complicated so- | tidy. every ntemher ot which depend;? | tor its existence on all the other members. Though it was horn to citizen-

.-'hip ;iml tlu* duties as well as the privileges Hi citizenship, it has become law to i t sc! i. and >o all enemy to its neighbours. 'I holt, assault and murder arc among its erinies. The analogy is i.i no danger ot being pushed too tar. impossible to say anything ot human society and the various ways in which, human society can Ik* disrupted which is not- also true or mincer. .Man ha~ built his civilisation after the pattern of Iris own frame : the greatest evil which threatens them is likewise the greatest evil by which that is assailed. ‘For the human body is n kind of coral island. It is made up not of 1 ricks.’ which are inanimate material. but of living and most active individuals. Me speak of ‘a. nian* as we speak of ‘an egg.' lint whereas the egg is a single living thing, a man is many things—a whole empire of living creatures, a vast agglomeration of millions and millions of separate ‘specks of life, each with its own existence, its own sensitiveness. its own dim qualities ot body, and even of spirit. The cell is the microcosm of the man. So much so, indeed. that. without stretching the parallel too far we may speak of the ‘mind of the cell’ aml oven of its ethic. Indeed, we must so speak, for. just, as a State possesses in some curious way an individuality which is without, yet not entirely distinct from that of any of vision which the cell cannot possess, yet winch belongs in a measure to the cell also. ‘‘lf the meaning of cancer as a fact of life is to hr grasped, this truth must needs be apprehended. The ethic of the ceil is both the origin of the law of the body and ir.s consequence/’