A monograph on diseases of the breast : their pathology and treatment, with special reference to cancer.

  • Williams, W. Roger (William Roger)
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A monograph on diseases of the breast : their pathology and treatment, with special reference to cancer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    same order as the yeast plant, have since been met with in a great variety of conditions ; and they are now generally re- garded as nothing but proteid coagula.* It seems certain that the attempt now being made to attribute cancer to psorosper- mosis will prove equally abortive.^^ In any event it is evident that the protozoon infesting the liver and intestines of rabbits, cannot be the cause of cancer, for in these animals the hepatic lesions are not really cancerous; they consist merely of dilated bile ducts containing papillary ingrowths. If the animals re- cover, as usually happens, the tumours disappear and the lesions completely heal. Moreover, in the undoubted instances of psorospermosis in human beings observed by Albarran, Eve, Silcock, &c., the induced lesions had no resemblance whatever to cancer. Of the many special researches for the cancer microbe that have yielded only negative results it will suffice to mention those of Shattock and Ballance,^*^ Senger,^'' Makara^^ and Brazzole. Hitherto the net result of all this bacteriological pathology has been to demonstrate that, although under certain conditions various micro-organisms may find a suitable habitat in cancer- ous growths, yet these have nothing whatever to do with the causation of the disease. In spite of repeated failures, however, the germ pathologists seem now to be more confident than ever that there must be a specific cancer microbe.-'^ I should like to know why? since we can so well account for all of the pheno- mena of the disease without it. It appears to me that the agency of micro-organisms is no more necessary to account for the genesis of cancer than it is to account for the genesis of a tooth or a hair. The microbe of cancer has not yet been discovered, because in all probability it does not exist. * Arch./, path. Atmt., Bd. cxxxii., Heft 3, 1893, &c. ** Q. v., Chapter ix., § 3 ; also Chapter xv. ■■ Trans. Path. Sor. Loud., vol. xxxviii., 18S7, p. 413. '■ Op. cit. -• Deutsche med. Woch., 1888. ■•* Brit. Med. Jour., vol. i., 1891, p. 565.