Biology and Medicine 471 



"Since the beginning of recorded medical history, and 

 doubtless before, imagination was given full play in the 

 treatment of cancer. The 'witch doctor' combined the secrets 

 of the 'black art' with the brewing of the 'witch's broth,' 

 and the unfortunate victim of cancer was given doses of the 

 mixture. Throughout the centuries the sufferer from this 

 disease has been the subject of almost every conceivable form 

 of experimentation. The fields and forests, the apothecary 

 shop and the temple have been ransacked for some success- 

 ful means of relief from this intractable malady. Hardly 

 any animal has escaped making its contribution, in hair or 

 hide, tooth, or toe-nail, thymus or tliyroid, liver or spleen, in 

 the vain search by man for a means of relief. The hand on 

 the dial has turned many times to the same point of effort 

 during the progress of the centuries, and it is possible to 

 find in remote districts today the same remedies being used 

 that were employed by 'cancer eurers' of long ago."^' 



Apart from these early fancies what we may call the mod- 

 ern theories of cancer have been many and varied. We 

 know that its immediate cause is an unlimited growth of 

 certain epithelial cells which run riot in the body, encroach- 

 ing upon and finally destroying the other tissues and pro- 

 ducing death. But what it is which causes this growth we 

 do not know. It has been supposed to be the result of the 

 growth of a wandering germ cell which has become misplaced 

 and undergone a sort of parthenogenesis within, rather than 

 without the body. In this connection the observations of 

 Professor Allen of the University of Kansas on the germ cells 

 of certain fish, Ampliibia, reptiles and mammals are of interest. 

 Allen found that the primitive sex cells in these animals in- 

 stead of arising in the sex glands appeared first in the wall of 

 the gut, whence they wandered into the ovary, where they ex- 

 perienced their final development. It is quite conceivable 

 that such a wandering germ cell might "get lost" in its mi- 

 grations, and finding itself in strange surroundings, develop 

 abnormally, producing a cancer. 



Closely related to this theory is that which explains can- 

 cer as the result of the type of division of epithelial cells 

 which characterizes the germ cells at a certain stage of their 

 development, and which is explained in Chapter VII deal- 

 ing with the physical basis of Mendelian inheritance. Yet 

 another theory of somewhat similar character, proposed by 

 the late Professor Boveri, the noted Cerman cytologist, re- 

 lates cancer to some abnormal type of cell division in which 

 the chromosomes become misplaced and unevenly distributed 



'■^ Above quotations from Bainbridge, "The Cancer Problem," pp. 

 2-3. By permission of the Macmillan Company. 



