Medicine: Cancer

Cancer has been increasing since the War at so devastating a rate that now 100,000 persons die of it annually in the U. S. Yet it is to some extent preventable.

Last week the American Society for the Control of Cancer (370 Seventh Ave., New York City; Dr. Howard C. Taylor, president; Dr. George A. Soper, managing director) girded itself for renewed educational propaganda. Last year it spent about $60,000 on its work. A fortnight ago John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave it $135,000. But it needs $1,000,000 as an endowment fund. This it will get.

Other societies working along the same lines include the American Association for the Prevention and Cure of Cancer (121 East 60th Street, New York City; Dr. L. Duncan Bulkley, president; Dr. Paul Luttinger, secretary-treasurer) and the Cancer Research Fund (Baltimore; Mrs. E. H. Bloodgood, treasurer).

Europe is similarly active (TIME, Feb. 1).

Definition. Cancer is one of three types of tumor growing in the epithelium, that is, the cellular tissue which covers the body’s free-surfaces, and lines tubes and cavities. One of these three types grows in finger-like processes or ridges. It is called papilloma and is benign. Also benign is adenoma, which lines gland-like depressions or cavities in the tissue structure. Under certain conditions papilloma and adenoma may infiltrate into healthy tissues and sometimes displace them. Here they resemble in effect the third epithelial tumor type—carcinoma, or cancer.

Cause. There is positively no one cause for cancer definitely agreed upon by reputable medical men, a fact which Dr. James Ewing of the New York Cancer Hospital phrased neatly last week before the American Society for the Control of Cancer: “Cancer is not a single disease but a great collection of many very diverse diseases of very different causation. There is not one cause of cancer. We find that in a great majority of cases rather definite concrete factors bring about the development, and that is summed up in the words ‘chronic irritation of a great variety of types.’ ”

Yet such medical men always give sympathetic study to theories sincerely presented.

Recent Theories. Virus. Virus, of many forms, appears in every cancer patient and vitiates his blood, upsets the biochemistry homologous to the normal for the species, so that the organism cannot repair the damage done to the locale of infection or irritation. In consequence, cells (which with normal, healthy blood food would take their normally diverse form peculiar to the local tissue) stop their growth at a primitive, atavistic stage. Such primitive cells may lie dormant while the blood is able to counteract the virus. But eventually the virus predominates in the blood and the primitive cells effloresce into cancer. (Propounded two years ago by Dr. Emilian O. Houda, Bohemian physician of Tacoma, Wash. Dr. Houda, in the current issue of Cancer indignantly asserts that Gye and Barnard of London, who have recently set forth a somewhat similar theory, have not given him due recognition for his prior work.)

Indicator. Dr. Botelho’s test for the presence of cancer has been so far developed that last week the French Academy of Medicine announced that it has been perfected. Its principle is similar to that of the Wassermann test. If it detects cancer in the early stages, the Botelho indicator test will be of incalculable benefit, for one or another of the recognized cancer treatments can stop the spread of the disease when applied to early stages.

Charlatanry. Although cancer is an exceedingly serious disease with a stupendous death rate, yet if it is discovered in its very early stages, it can be cured, at least death prevented, in the great majority of cases. Any suspicious lump should be called to the physician’s attention at once. He has authentic knowledge of what can be done by medicaments, surgery, xray, radium, colloidal lead (TIME, Feb. 1).

Still, stupid people turn to quacks, hearken to vicious promises, such as appear in the current issue of dolichocephalic Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture. Thus he shrieks in headlines:

How CANCER CAN BE CURED The Dread Disease Yields to Dietary Methods are Treatment, and Triumphant — Less Non-Surgical Than Forty Per Cent Deaths as Compared with Ninety Per Cent in Operative Methods — Sufferers at Last May Escape the Gory Knives of the Obstinate, Archaic Blood-Letters.

By twisting facts and dragging in famed medical names, which he otherwise sneers at, he gives the impression to his misty-minded readers that “correct” diet will cure cancer.

Specific Studies. At the Dallas A.M.A. convention two informative papers on cancer were read:

Lungs. The lungs have become the seventh most frequent locale for cancer. (First is the stomach; second the uterus; third the breast.) The lung type has often been mistaken for tuberculosis or other diseases. The mistake is excusable, for the symptoms of cancer, which may be nodular, infiltrating and diffuse or miliary, resemble in some respects those of acute and chronic tuberculosis, fibroid phthisis, fibroid pleurisy, unresolved pneumonia, syphilis of the lungs, mucoses of the lungs, bronchiectasis, interlobar empyema, abscess of the lungs and enlargements and tumors common to the mediastinum. Of cancer of the lungs the constant symptoms seem to be: pain, dyspnea, cough, weakness, loss of weight, cachexia, fever, anorexia. Before deciding that his patient has cancer, the careful doctor, from his store of knowledge and experience, which no laymen need doubt or seek to supplement, eliminates all other possibilities. However, the physician keeps a possible secondary lung involvement ever in mind. A skilled radiographer should also be called in before final decision. (“Primary Cancer of the Lungs,” by John A. Lichty, F. R. Wright and E. A. Baumgartner of the Clifton Springs Sanitarium and Clinic, Clifton Springs, N. Y.)

Cervix Uteri. Grant E. Ward of the Howard A. Kelly Hospital, Baltimore, explained to the A.M.A. Dallas visitors the radium treatment developed there for this type of cancer in the last 18 years. He described the apparatus used and the principle underlying the technique employed. In many cases radium has improved the patients, both symptomatically and physically.