Cancer
Its Cause and Treatment (Complete)
9781465628848
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Cancer in man exists all over the globe, but in different degrees of frequency, according to varying conditions of life, as we shall presently see. Malignant growths occur also in animals and fishes, though also with greatly varying frequency under different conditions; but there are few real tumors in reptiles or amphibians. Tumors are also occasionally found in vegetable organisms, presenting increased growth and proliferation of cells, arising from adventitious, or abnormally evolving buds, as also from parasitic and other external irritants. While these vegetable tumors are very interesting and in a measure instructive, in regard to the peculiarities of cell growth which they exhibit, they bear, of course, no relation to cancer in the animal kingdom, although some have endeavored to argue otherwise. There is, however, a certain suggestion of analogy to be found in the observation made by one writer, that “the origin of buds, as well as their subsequent development, is chiefly determined by the conditions of nutrition. Wherever there is an excess of nutritive material, capable of being utilized for growth by the cells of the part, there buds may arise”; we shall see later that the same thought applies to cancer in man and animals, when we come to the consideration of the relation of overindulgence along certain lines of eating and drinking to cancer. Cancer has well been styled a disease of modern civilization, like tuberculosis, although of quite a different nature. Interesting studies have been made in regard to the increased death rate from the former in England, coincident with a diminished mortality of the latter, in accordance with nutritional changes which have taken place in certain populations: and in the first lecture I mentioned that in the United States the mortality from tuberculosis had fallen 25 per cent. between 1900 and 1912 while, as we shall see later, the mortality from cancer has certainly risen. Williams, who quotes very largely from the accurate statistics which have long been carefully recorded in England, says that “while tubercle has declined with great rapidity, cancer has increased at a still faster rate, and these inversely related changes are still in active progress. In illustration of these remarks it may be mentioned that during the last half of the nineteenth century, the cancer mortality for England tripled: while, during the same period the tubercle death rate declined to the extent of nearly one-half. Unless some great change in the national habits takes place, of which there is at the present no well marked indication, cancer will ere long claim more victims than phthisis, as is already the case in many localities—e. g., Hampstead, Clifton, Bath, etc.” He further says, “I regard this decline in the presence of tuberculous diseases as the direct outcome of the better food and improved hygienic conditions, for which we are indebted to our increased national prosperity: and I shall endeavor to show that conditions of this kind, by their action in another direction, are also mainly responsible for the augmented cancer mortality.”
