42 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



influence everywhere. We can hardly go wrong if we 

 say that every cell in the body influences every other cell, 

 and that those which are in an immense majority have 

 much power. Newton's law of gravity might almost be 

 translated into a somatic law, even if some physiological 

 Einstein presently corrected it. 



It is, therefore, by no means mere guesswork to assume 

 that the relations of epithelium and connective tissue are the 

 essence of the cancer problem. Quite independent of their 

 cross action in repair we actually see in atrophic " scirrhus " 

 of the mamma that this slowly developing cancer is sur- 

 rounded by more or less dense strands of fibrous tissue, and 

 is often known as withering or contracting cancer. Patients 

 may live for twenty years or more with this variety of the 

 disease. In old age the connective tissue appears to give 

 way, and the few imprisoned anarchic epithelial cells may 

 resume their invasive qualities. It was such cancers 

 which showed the older physicians that there were attempts 

 at repair in malignancy ; but they attributed its arrest to 

 mere mechanical action, a view not tenable when we 

 consider the great erosive effect of really wild epithelium. 

 Handley has shown that in melanotic cancer at a later stage 

 of permeation, there is inflammation accompanied by 

 round-celled infiltration and fibrous growths, while in 

 Paget's Disease there is peri-lymphatic fibrosis. From the 

 experiments in vitro of Champy, much can be learnt as to 

 the relations of these tissues. He demonstrated that when 

 renal tissue was grown in a nutritive plasm it showed, 

 after nine hours, new tubules of a primitive order, while 

 still further away from the original section the epithelial 

 cells did not form tubules, and were of a simple embryonic 

 type. This can only be attributed to loss of control by 

 normal inhibitions. When the same worker cultivated 



