Abstract
IN conformity with a scheme of inquiry embarked upon o^ in October, 1902, the third scientific report of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, recently issued, treats, like its predecessors, of cancer as a problem of general and experimental biology. It contains no definite answer to the questions, What is the nature and what the cause of cancer? and beyond demonstrating that systematic experiment justifies the early surgical removal of a tumour as the only possible treatment at the present time, the report is silent as to remedial and preventive measures. These shortcomings will almost certainly arouse misgivings on the part of those who cannot appreciate how progress is made in any field of knowledge. They will also, no doubt, be seized upon by persons who, in their ignorance, assert that all scientific efforts should be concentrated on utilitarian ends, and they will be exploited by the charlatan, to whom for a space a free field is still left for his nostrums. The sustained efforts of the past six years to penetrate the mysteries of cancer have been accompanied by a corresponding activity on the part of faddists and quacks who advertise themselves by proclaiming the failure of scientific investigation to yield “practical fruits.” The danger of their literary activity is but enhanced by the powers of diction and of exposition possessed by some of the writers. They could profitably devote their literary ability to expounding to the public the true facts and difficulties of the cancer problem instead of the ridiculous causes they maintain before a jury of the credulous and the suffering. In the absence of this enlightened attitude on their part it is my duty, since the second scientific report was followed by volumes of nonsense on the part of such persons, bluntly to inform the general reader of the folly of ignoring the necessity for the early surgical removal of cancer, and of running from one faddist or quack to another yet more ignorantly sanguine. If, in the future, the progress of scientific investigation provides a substir tute for or an adjunct to surgical treatment, there will be no needless delay in placing it within the reach of the cancer patient.
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B., E. Advance in Knowledge of Cancer . Nature 79, 261–264 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/079261a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/079261a0