Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 37, 12 September 1901, Page 1

Current Topics

' I don't know moch much about arnychists,' says ' Dooley,' the philosopher of Archery Road, Chicago. 'We had thim here— wanst. They wint again polismen, mostly. Mebbe that's because polismen's th' nearest things to kings they could find.' But the cable messages in Monday's papers show that, even in the free realms of Uncle Sam, the anarchist — even the native-born anarchist — is a power to be dreaded, that he is filled to the chin with the deep and mysterious fanaticism which he caught from his European confrere, and that he has begun to fly at higher game than ' polismen.'

We earnestly hope that President McKinley will ' round' the treacherous attack of the fanatical youth from Detroit, and that he will not go to swell the long list of rulers who during the past hundred and two years have fallen beneath the dagger, knife, pistol, or picrine or dynamite shell of the assassin. The list of those who were attacked is a lengthy one, and, in briefest terms, runs as follows: George 111. was shot at twice in one day in May, 1800. The first Napoleon was attacked while First Consul in December of the same year. He escaped, but of his followers, twenty were killed and fortytwo wounded, Paul 1., Czar of Russia, was assassinated one bleak night in March, 1801. No fewer than seven attempts were made upon the life of Louis Philippe, the ' bourgeois king' of France. The most startling of these took place on July 28, 1835, when the Corsican Fieschi attempted to send him across the Styx by means of an infernal machine attached to twenty barrels of gunpowder. Like Napoleon, Louis Philippe escaped without a scratch, but eleven persons around him were blown to smithereens. Queen Isabella of Spain was stabbed on February 2, 1852; King Victor Emmanuel was shot at by an unsteady marksman in the following year and Ferdinand Charles 11., of Parma in 1854; and King Ferdinand of Naples had sundry inches of cold steel inserted into him by a soldier on December 8, 1856. One of the most sensational attempted assassinations of rulers during the nineteenth century took place on January 14, 1858, when Orsini and others attempted to translate Napoleon 111. to another sphere by the aid of bombs. Prince Daniel 11. of Montenegro was assassinated by an exiled and indignant Montenegrin on August 14, iB6O. Two years later a wild-eyed student took an ineffectual shot at King Otho of Greece. The assassin's hand first fell upon the Presidents of the United States on April 15, 1865, when the fanatical and half-insane John Wilkes Booth shot Abe Lincoln to death in Forde's Theatre, Washington.

Three years after the assassination of President Lincoln, Prince Michael 111. of Servia was assassinated at Belgrade. The gloomy, morose, cock-fighting Sultan Abd-el-'Aziz was deposed on May 29, 1876, and a few days later was quietly and mysteriously ' removed ' to another world with the aid of a pair of sissors. The father of the present boy-king of Spain was twice made a target by young fanatics in 1878 and 1879. Happily, neither of the bullets found its billet. In May 1878,

and again in June, the Emperor William I. of Germany was shot at. One of the intending assassins merely hit the woundless air; the other (Dr. Nobeling) scratched the imperial hand with his revolver bullet. Then there came a lull in the rulershooting industry for a short time. It was broken on March 13, 1 88 1, when Czar Alexander 11. was blown to fragments in the streets of St. Petersburg. It is satisfactory to know that the man who threw the bomb (Grenevitsky) was pounded into mincemeat by his own bombshell and that his accomplices were all duly hanged by the neck till they were dead. President Garfield was murdered by Guiteau in Washington on July 2, 1 88 1 ; Carnot, the French President, was assassinated by Pietro Santo on June 24, 1894 ; and two years later the much-travelled Nasr-ed-Uin, Shah of Persia was added to the list of the murdered rulers of the nineteenth century. In quick succession followed attacks on King Humbert of Italy and President Faure of France, and the assassinations of General Borda, President of Uruguay, on August 26, 1897, of President Barrios, of Guatemala, on February 9, 1898, and of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, at Geneva, on September 10 of the same year. The list of murdered rulers was, we trust, definitely closed by the assasisnation of the late King Humbert, who was fatally shot at Monza by the anarchist Bresci on July 29 of last year. Three attempts were made upon the life of the late Cjueen Victoria and two upon that of the present King, but in every case, happily, no injury was done to the intended royal victim.

A Point of View. The Archery Road philosopher says, with a good show of reason, that ' 'Tis hard bein' a king these days. Manny's the man on a throne, 1 he continues, ' wishes his father 'd brought him up a cooper, what with wages bein' docked be parlymints an' ragin' arnychists runnin' wild with dinnymite bombs undher their arrums an' carvin'- knives in their pockets. Onaisy, as Hogan says, is th' head that wears a crown. They'se other heads that're onaisy, too ; but ye don't hear iv thim. But a man grows up in one iv thim furrin counthries, an' he's thrained f'r to be a king. Heaven may've intindid him f'r a dooce or a jack, at th' most; but he has to follow th' same line as his father. 'Tis like pawnbrokin' that way. Ye never heerd iv a pawnbroker's son doin' anything else. Wanst a king, always a king. Other men's sons may pack away a shirt in a thrunk, an' go out into th' worruld, brakin' on a freight or ladin' Indyanny bankers up to a shell game. But a man that's headed f'r a throne can't run away. He's got to take th' job. If he kicks, they blindfold him an' back him in. He can't ask f'r his time at th 1 end iv th' week, an' lave. He pays himself. He can't sthrike, because he'd have to ordher out the polis to subjoo himself. He can't go to th' boss an' say : "Me hours is too long an' th' worrk js tajious. Give me me paycheck." He has no boss. A man can't be indipindint onless he has a boss.'

Cancer. The great English surgeon-humorist-satirist Abernethy was cne of an old class of practitioners who joined great skill with great brusquerie — we might say rudeness — to his patients. He used, in his blunt way, to attribute all the diseases of humanity to 'gormandising and stuffing,' fidgeting and discontent, and the play of the passions. The great man's

sledge-hammer statement was, perhaps, a trifle too sweeping. 'Gormandising and stuffing' are a recognised remedy for consumption in the Nordrach or open-air treatment ; and there is a large class of diseases that are outside the operation of Abernethy's theory of causation. There is another class of such uncertain origin that the highest reach of medical science has thus far failed to hazard even a good guess at their cause and nature. Asiastic leprosy is one of these. Cancer was, until a few weeks ago, another. Excessive meat-eating, devouring of unwholesome or improperly-slaughtered sheep and oxen, and various other reasons have been assigned as exciting causes of cancer. Dr. Herbert Snow, of the the London Cancer Hospital, lays the cause of the fearful malady at the door of • the increased stress of our modern life.' And he adds : — * Until society emerges into some calmer sea ... a progressive increase of cancer, duly proportionate to the growing severity of the struggle for existence, may be predicted as a matter of course.'

Dr. Snow maintains that cancer is not hereditary — a conclusion that will bring comfort to many. Others state that the tendency to its development is frequently hereditary. Doctors proverbially differ — this is one of the most valued privileges of the profession. But two things are agreed upon: (i) It is a disease of middle life— a true type of the reaper that waits till the harvest is ripe. In New Zealand he gathers his biggest crop from among those who are from fifty to seventy years old. (2) The other certainty in cancerous uncertainties is this : that cancer is on the increase. Some time ago we quoted statistics which show that the death-rate from this cause in England has almost doubled since 1864, and that in New Zealand the rate rose from 2*69 per 10,000 living in 188 1 to 5.53 in 1895— with a continuous and astonishing increase in males, and a considerable but erratic increase in the deaths of females. Many medical men have long suspected that cancer is directly produced by the action of plaguy microscopic parasites such as those whose gnawings give rise to tuberculosis. This theory has, it appears, been confirmed, and the news will be received nowhere with greater interest than in New Zealand.

Dragged into the Light. According to our esteemed contemporary the Otago Daily Times, Professor Max Schuller, of Berlin, has, with his big microscope, hunted down, captured, cultivated, and studied the deadly bacillus which (as he has discovered) is the cause of cancer. 'His methods,' says our contemporary, 'were as original as successful, and the result is a triumph of experimental skill.' The description of his findings makes sufficiently ' creepy ' reading. ' The cancer bacillus,' we are told, ' feeds upon the living tissues, evolving a deadly poison during the process, and Dr. Schuller kept it alive for months (after it had completely absorbed the tissue removed from a cancerous tumor) by feeding it with fresh-drawn human blood. The bacilli form colonies, the older massing themselves in the tissues and the younger grouping themselves around the mass. Some are provided with filaments with which they navigate the body through the medium of the blood, and set up secondary cancer where they find a suitable lodging place. That explains why the surgeon's knife seldom effects a radical cure, for the cancerous tumor is the incubating centre whence battalions of free swimming bacilli are sent along the circulating tract, and sooner or later they will mass together and form a new tumor. Dr. Schuller found when he cultivated the bacilli in a portion of removed tissue that innumerable capsules were formed. He says there were thousands and again thousands of capsules to the cubic millimetre, and these were alike in size, color, nature, and make up. The capsules were mere shells — the egg from which the dangerous parasite breaks after attaining maturity. After a time the capsules break, setting free the captive bacilli, and these bacilli are the real cause of cincer. Besides these capsules, numbers of smaller corpuscles, with two skins, marked with dark stripes, were discovere i, the stripes marking the pores whence the deadly poison exudes. A kind of halo surrounding the corpuscles was found under higher powers of the microscope to be composed of tiny, light-colored filaments, which were incessantly moving. 3

Is there a Remedy ? Cancer has been the subject of endless quackery and empiricism. As far back as iB6O Sir Spencer Wtlls threw a good deal of much-needed light upon the subject in his book, Cancer and Caiuer-curcrs. Most of our readers will remember the vivid Hash of hopeful interest that was excited ten years ago by Count Mattel's tlectro-homoeopathic treatment. Lady Paget wrote glowing articles on the subject in the National Review. Mr. Stead gave the enterprising Count a series of tree advertisements in the Revievi of Reviews, and quite a little group of medical men pinned their frUih to frequently and extremely minute doses of ' globules' about the size of a pinhead, and 'liquid electriciiy,' and alternations of * antiscrofoloso ' and ' anti-canceroso.' There was a boom in Mattei

remedies. A number of cancer patients submitted themselves for treatment by the new and secret remedies. No marked curative effects were observed, and the Mattei boom collapsed ike a torn balloon. Dr. Schuller's discovery, however, is likely to lead to a cure for this dreaded disease. The old Roman general reduced his enemy by the expedient of 'lopping the tall poppies '—cutting off the leaders. But Dr. Schuller opines that the coming remedy for cancer will begin with the destruction of the young bacilli. He found that these are of delicate constitution, that those he experimented with were ' extremely sensitive to variations of temperature,' and that they ' died immediately the temperature was raised or lowered a few degrees from the normal temperature of the tissues in which they perform their baleful functions.' Cold and hot water slew them off, absolute alcohol disagreed so violently with them that they died ; but the older organisms were made of sterner stuff, and may have to be left to expire of mere age. ' Dr. Schuller advances the opinion that the parasites can be destroyed by some re-agent injected into the human blood, although he leaves it to the great medical authorities to discover the best destroying agent.' But he warns the public that cancer is infectious, that there is a danger in dwellings where people have died of the disease, that the dog, and even the harmless, necessary cat, are liable to it, and that the malady may be communicated by the affectionate lick of the tongue of a cancerous dog. Readers will do well to make a mental note of all this. And in the meantime let us hope that the great medical authorities will speedily discover some serum or anti-toxin that will give the quietus to the cancer bacillus as Pasteur's remedies did to the wretched microscopic things that caused anthrax and the silkworm plague.