The infectivity of cancer : a retrospect and a forecast / by D'Arcy Power.

  • Power, D'Arcy, Sir, 1855-1941.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The infectivity of cancer : a retrospect and a forecast / by D'Arcy Power. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    Beorinted for the Author from the British Medical Jourmal, ^ April 27th, 1895. THE INFECTIVITY OF CANCER: A RETRO- SPECT AND A ^ FORECAST.^ By D'AEOY POWEE, M.A., M.B.Oxon., F.E.C.S.Ena., Surgeon Victoria Hospital for Children. Billroth, in a remarkable lecture on the interaction of liv- ing vegetable and animal cells, reads us an emphatic lesson which it behoves all scientific workers to lay to heart. '' Now- a days, he says, everything is too hurried. We suffer from an insatiable craving for new, or apparently new, facts m the hope of obtaining a possible sensational success. No time is allowed us for an occasional rest to reflect upon or to recon- sider the onward course of scientific inquiry. Where are we ? What have we left behind? What is ahead? Is it worth while to go farther in this direction or in that ? Has detailed work given us a profitable knowledge of or an insight into the whole subject? No one now finds time to answer such questions. , , , r ^i, i Surely if the words of the master are true of pathology generally they are still more true of that small department of the science dealing with the causation of cancer. The feverish energy of modern pathologists is nowhere better seen than in the endeavour to discover the origin of this disease. Observation has been piled upon observation with such rapidity that it has hardly been possible to keep pace with the daily additions to our knowledge made within the last four or five years. There is, however, an uneasy feeling in the minds of many clinical surgeons that all is not right, and that the foundations upon which this huge superstruc- ture rest are insecure, for they are founded upon a hypo- thesis. There can be no doubt that such unbelief is not wholly wrong, for too many workers have assumed for a fact what they should only have held as a theory. The working hypothesis of the infective nature of cancer is that cancer depends upon the presence of a specific organism which is a protozoon rather than a protophyte, and that it requires a special soil, which we call predisposition, for its successful cultivation. This hypothesis is based partly upon evidence to be appreciated by the trained pathologist, and partly upon evidence of a popular character which appeals to the unscientific mind in rauch the same manner as do the tenets of religion and of politics. 1 Read at a meeting of the Oxford and District Branch of the British Medical AsBOciation.