DISCOVERY OF PROTEIN PRINCIPLE IN THERAPEUTICS 121 



important question as to whether seeming recoveries under the 

 proteal treatment are complete and permanent recoveries. These 

 questions will be discussed in the ensuing pages, but with no 

 suggestion that a final answer as to the permanency of seeming 

 cures can be made except after the lapse of a long period of time. 



"But if the question of the possible cure of cancer by the 

 new type of medication must be left in abeyance, there is no 

 occasion for delay in spreading broadcast the knowledge that 

 the proteals bring a message of new hope for the cancer sufferer, 

 whatever the form or stage of progress of his malady. The 

 proteal remedies have already conferred unique benefits upon 

 not far from 3,000 sufferers ; they have been responsible for 

 an enormous alleviation of pain in the aggregate, and for a 

 notable extension of human lives. 



"According to recent statistics, cancer accounts for five or 

 six per cent, of all deaths. That is equivalent to saying that 

 at least five million people are living in the United States to-day 

 who must die of cancer unless medical science in the coming 

 years deals more effectively with the malady than it has known 

 how to do in the past. 



"I dare to hope that the facts cited in this monograph justify 

 the belief that we are beginning to see a little light in this dark 

 field. 



"I dare even to hope that the beginning of the end of the can- 

 cer scourge is at hand. Proteal treatment may not offer the 

 final solution of the cancer problem ; but I verily believe that 

 it points the way to a solution. 



"In any event, the proteal treatment offers to-day a hitherto 

 unattainable measure of solace, and a message of new hope for 

 cancer sufferers everywhere in the world." 



To be able to write such an estimate, secure in the belief that 

 the evidence already in hand abundantly justified it, might well 

 be considered adequate reward for two years of strenuous and 

 nerve-racking investigation. But in point of fact this was only 

 the beginning, as I then conceived it, and as I now conceive it. 

 In the article of October 2, 1915, in the New York Medical 

 Journal I had expressly repudiated the idea that the protein 

 response has any specific relation to cancer except in so far as 

 the cancer mass chances to be composed of protein matter, as- 

 serting the belief that the province of protein therapy is the 

 entire .field of protein infection. I purposely refrained from 

 mentioning bacterial infections as such, for I knew that at best 

 the suggestion of so general a principle as that implied would 

 tax the credulity of the profession. But that I had the bac- 

 terial infections in mind is implied in the fact that these are, 

 as a matter of course, protein infections; and is explicitly sug- 



