Medicine: Cancer Rot

Perhaps Germany’s Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, compelled the publication of a report in Berlin newspapers last week that a Nazi anatomist had discovered the precise cause of cancer. At least that is what scientists who respect Wilhelm von Bremer of Berlin’s State Biological Institute would like to believe.

According to Dr. von Bremer, cancer comes from a germ which skulks inside red blood cells. Berlin papers printed pictures of such cancerigenic germs, which Dr. von Bremer claimed to have separated from their hosts. He has even bred the germs and with their descendants created cancers in perfectly healthy creatures. And if he spoke the truth he has cured cancers medically rather than surgically.

Belief No. 1: the blood of elderly people, who are prone to develop cancer, is more alkaline than the blood of cancer-resisting youth. Belief No. 2: as a cancer fades under ministrations of radium or x-rays, the elderly patient’s blood decreases in alkalinity, gains in acidity. Many a researcher has, without any definite success, attempted to attack cancer by injecting acids into the blood to reduce its alkalinity. Dr. von Bremer claimed complete success for this method as a means of killing off his “cancer germs.”

Explosions of derision and disbelief immediatety followed publication of Dr. von Bremer’s ideas in the U. S. Cockroaches have been blamed for causing cancer by no less a person than Nobel Prizewinner Johannes Fibiger of Denmark. Many a lesser light has offered a variant of the germ theory. Subtle irritants, chemical or mechanical, have been suggested. Likewise cancer has been attributed to nervous strain, city life, life itself, breakdown of individual body cells, degeneracy of the entire constitution.

“Cures” have been just as multitudinous: caustics, serums, chemicals, hormones. But the fact remains that only by surgery, radium or x-ray does any reputable physician today treat cancer with any hope of success.

When he read the Berlin news, Professor Francis Carter Wood, director of Columbia University’s Institute for Cancer Research and editor of the American Journal of Cancer sneered: “This is all rot. There’s nothing to it. Plenty of this sort of stuff is coming out of Germany just now.”

Dr. James Ewing, foremost U. S. authority on .cancer, director of cancer research at Manhattan’s Memorial Hospital where only cancer is treated, impatiently denounced: “The claim is so improbable, so unsubstantiated, and so unlikely that it is not even worth discussng.”

Dr. Ira I. Kaplan, radiologist who supervises all the cancer work done in Manhattan’s municipal hospitals: “We have ‘:ested over a hundred such claims in the I^ity Cancer Institute, not once but a number of times. They all proved to be absolutely worthless.”