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THE APPLICATION OF EXPERIMENT 

 TO THE STUDY OF CANCER 



By E. F. BASHFORD, M.D. 



General Superintendent of Research and Director of the Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer 



Research Fund 



Dogmatic statements regarding the nature of cancer have 

 broken more reputations than they have made. Paradoxical 

 as it may be, progress in our knowledge of cancer has been 

 made mainly by failure, by successive generations of investi- 

 gators proving the insufficiency of the knowledge and the 

 hypotheses of their predecessors ; but this applies equally to 

 the advancement of knowledge in many fields. The advance- 

 ment of knowledge by the process of exclusion is surely the 

 most tedious of methods, since, beyond all else, it signifies 

 inability to formulate correctly the problem which it is sought 

 to solve. We are still struggling to formulate correctly the 

 problem, or better, problems of cancer, the sum of our facts 

 not yet sufficing for an unequivocal statement of a problem 

 which shall finally rid us of the everlasting question, What is 

 the cause of cancer ? We must be patient of the necessity for 

 undertaking destructive work. In the face of the many defeats 

 efforts at constructive work have suffered in the past, we must 

 be mindful that hypotheses and theories, like men, "may rise on 

 stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things." Finally 

 the truth is elicited. While avoiding dogmatic statements, I 

 hope to show that the application of experiment to the study of 

 cancer is rational to-day, and has advanced in four or five years 

 to a stage where the results have become of constructive value. 

 In the space of a short article it is impossible to give an 

 adequate account of the many aspects from which "cancer" 

 requires to be studied. I propose to consider mainly the 

 application of the experimental method to the study of growth, 

 and to show how greatly knowledge has advanced since the 

 first experiment on cancer was made in 1773. At that time 



