Medicine: Cancer is Curable

Cancer is curable, the American College of Surgeons has decided. So certain are the surgeons of this that they used the phrase as the title of their most important symposium in St. Louis last week. Two dozen able surgeons stood up in meeting one after another and reported 8,836 onetime cases of cancer known to be cured. Most dramatic witness was Dr. Edward Loughborough Keyes, Cornell Medical School urologist. Cried he: “I am an example of the cure of cancer. Three cancers have been removed from my face by radium or actual cautery.”

All this cheer was for morale, to cheer up the public. For several years doctors have tried to scare everyone with a new, unaccountable lump on his body into running for medical examination. That was all very well, until psychiatrists began to complain that they were being overworked and underpaid by daffy cancer-phobes. It seemed wise to right-face concerning cancer, sound an encouraging clarion.

Several accidents have contributed to this new cancer attitude. The American Society for the Control of Cancer no longer has much money for an effective anti-cancer campaign, although the Society has just announced it would enlarge its Bulletin and have nothing to do with the Chemical Foundation’s American Journal of Cancer. Another accident has been the shyness of the Society’s director. Dr. Clarence Cook Little, with the Press—the cheapest, most effective means of honorable public health propaganda.*

Fact is—and what was meant by the surgeons in St. Louis and othercheerleaders who began a fortnight’s discussion of tumors at the New York Academy of Medicine last week—that cancer is curable if recognized very soon after its first development in the body. Then it can very often be eradicated by knife (steel or electric), X-ray or radium. Declared Dr. Franklin H. Martin, director-general of the College of Surgeons and organizer of their cancer symposium: “If all cases of cancer could be diagnosed early and treated promptly in their incipiency, the annual death rate from the disease, now recorded as 150,000 in the U. S. and Canada, would be reduced by at least 33%, or 50,000 per year.” But integrity compelled Dr. Stuart William Harrington of the Mayo Clinic to note that “present clinical methods are inadequate to detect malignancy until it is fairly well advanced.”

Another fact is that cancer is not curable in the sense that its cause (or causes) is known and can be combated directly. But thousands of investigators are on the track. Although Dr. Francis Carter Wood of Columbia University last week growled to the Manhattan colloquium that there are not more than 50 competent cancer research workers in the world and therefore he would not recommend large endowments for cancer research laboratories such as Dr. James Ewing urges (TIME, Jan. 17, 1931), some one of the lesser multitude may any day sniff out some great discovery in the cancer field.

Declared Dr. Wood: “Almost every known analine dye, many alkaloids, all metals, ground up tumor particles, filtrates from tumor cells, extracts from all the organs, serums from animals have been injected with cancer cells so as to produce an antibody. But all these have been tried and have failed with two exceptions.” The exceptions: lead, which is dangerous; a powerful antiserum, which does not effect a tumor that has started to grow.

Cancer is baffling to deal with, “because it is not one disease but a group of diseases. Each one may have a variable number of causes. It is a disease that rises within the body itself, withoutalways requiring an outside agent to produce it. Until a marked and constant difference between normal and cancer cells can be discovered, a vague, undirected search for cancer is a waste of time.”

When doctors can answer Dr. Wood’s last proposition, “we shall have the answer to life itself,” commented Dr. Ellis Fischel of St. Louis University School of Medicine, “and we shall grow babies in test tubes.”*

Despite disappointments certain advances have been made during the year in the treatment and alleviation of cancer. In Chicago Dr. Loyal Edward Davis of Northwestern University Medical School & Director Max Cutler of Michael Reese Hospital tumor clinic have been treating certain brain tumors by inserting radium needles into the diseased brain tissue itself. In Manhattan Dr. Charles Albert Elsberg of the Neurological Institute & associates are saving nine out of ten of their brain tumor cases by early diagnosis and bold excision.

At first a cancer, except one at the tip of the tongue, causes no pain. But as the growth increases and eats into sensory nerves, the pain becomes indescribably horrible. Morphine has long been the doctor’s analgesiac. Dr. Henry Swartley Ruth, Philadelphia homeopath, who attended the Congress of Anesthetists in Manhattan last week, recommended alcohol as a pain killer. He traces the sensory nerve leading from the site of the cancer and injects about a cubic centimeter of 45% alcohol near the point where the nerve trunk joins the spinal cord. The alcohol deadens the pain completely, does not interfere with muscular action. One of Dr. Ruth’s treatments lasts from three to six months, may be repeated. Dr. Mario Dogliotti of Turin, Italy, told the anesthetists that he gets similar benefits by injecting seven to 15 drops of alcohol directly into the spinal canal.

Still another way of comforting a cancer victim was suggested early thisyear by the late Dr. Willy Meyer of Manhattan. He applied deep X-rays to thecancer, gave the patient dilute hydrochloric acid to offset any acidosis, and made him breathe a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Dr. CarlWilliam Hoefflich of Houston, president of the Associated Anesthetists of the U. S. and Canada, tried the Meyer treatment on his mother, 82. Reportedhe last week: “The growth has greatly decreased in size and the pain is gone. In fact, my mother has been doing much of her own housework.”

Greatest cancer discovery during the year—according to Sir George Lenthal Cheatle, British cancer expert who went to St. Louis to become an honorary fellow of the American College of Surgeons— was the discovery, by Dr. R. J. Lundferd of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, that a dye called trypan blue, frequently-used to treat malaria and African sleeping sickness, would stain healthy body cells, would not stain cancer cells. Trypan blue enables the pathologist to distinguish finely between healthy and cancerous tissue.

Digressing within the general topic of cancer, Sir Lenthal last week observed that life habits seem to be factors in causing certain types of cancer. The frequency of cancer in women is practically the same in Japan, England, Switzerland and Holland. England and Switzerland show large percentages of cancer of the breast and uterus, considerably more of both kinds than has The Netherlands. In Japan there is a great deal of uterine cancer, very little mammary cancer.

*Last week the New York City Cancer Committee began its autumn solicitation for funds with an illustrated booklet “Cancer: Then and Now” and an editorial in the New York Journal. Within 24 hours 80 persons with symptoms of cancer asked the committee where to get relief.

*Cancer cells behave very much like embryo tissue. One test for occult cancer is exactly the same as an early test for pregnancy.