208 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192i 



of benefit for a considerable number of diseased conditions of which 

 the list is doubtless now incomplete. Among these maladies cancer, 

 because of its seriousness, occupies the most important place and 

 overshadows all others. How does the radiation from radium act 

 upon this scourge ? The knowledge of its mode of action upon can- 

 cerous tumors will enable us to understand its effectiveness in the 

 cases of other tumors and less severe maladies. 



Cancer has as yet yielded but a few of its secrets. But we now 

 know that it is no longer to be looked upon as a fatally hereditary 

 disease, the appearance and growth of which are so equally certain 

 that we can only religiously or stoically resign ourselves to a certain 

 outcome. It is, in the beginning, a local sore, a strictly and exclu- 

 sively local sore, arising at a single place because of the abnormal, 

 disordered, anarchic development of a few microscopic cells from 

 various provocative causes. It is being studied with success in our 

 research laboratories by means of animal experimentation. 



In the first phase as a local sore it is certain that cancer is curable, 

 l>erfectly curable. The necessary and sufficient condition for the 

 cure is the suppression and complete destruction of the cancer cells 

 already developed at the original focus and in the process of dissemi- 

 nation into the neighboring tissue. 



For the suppression of cancerous tumors there was for a long 

 time only one known weapon, the knife of the surgeon. We have to 

 acknowledge that even to-day in many cases it is the best. Surgeons 

 have cured and will yet cure cancers in great numbers. Their suc- 

 cesses, formerly exceptional, have been multiplied since Pasteur, by 

 his immortal discoveries, and Lister, by his applications of them, have 

 collaborated in the development of a new surgery as audacious and 

 beneficial in its intervention as the older surgery was timid and 

 murderous. These successes would be even more numerous were the 

 recourse to the surgeon not so often too tardy. 



To the knife of the surgeon the researches of the physicist have 

 now added two other weapons: First, the radiation discovered by 

 Eontgen, and second, radium, but more especially in that complex 

 radiation from radium made up of three different constituents desig- 

 nated by the first three letters of the Greek alphabet: the gamma 

 rays. 



The X and the gamma rays are of the same nature. Both possess, 

 along with the property of passing through all bodies, the power, in 

 proper doses, of destroying living cells. The gamma rays, besides 

 being much more penetrating, are also more amenable to very divei-se 

 conditions of treatment. The miniature source, which the least 

 particle of radium forms, can be inclosed in a small tube or in a 

 fine needle of metal like unto a Lilliputian Rontgen tube. Such tubes 

 may be distributed in greater or smaller numbers close to the skin or 



