INTRODUCTION 5
1910,
he writes concerning this case: “By the way, that case of encephaloid breast
cancer is alive and free from recurrence----diagnosed October, 1908. I saw her
on November 29, as near as mortal man can say ‘cured.’ Further comment on the
above is not needed.
I
was well aware, as any scientific man is, that negative results in scientific
experiments never proved anything at all in science, but was also under the
impression that very many scientific discoveries of great moment had been the
outcome of single successful experiments. The fall of an apple from a tree
revealed the law of universal gravitation to Newton. In our own day a single
photographic impression of some keys, etc., led the physicist Röntgen, in 1895,
to the discovery of the Röntgen, or X rays; and, strange to say, the find of a
few stray ganglion cells in the development of an American lake-fish in 1888
led the writer ultimately to the discovery of the nature of cancer, and of much
besides. The scientific investigator knows, even if some surgeons be ignorant
of it, that very many discoveries in science are the outcome of what at first
were of the nature of single successful experiments. Even the cures* of cancer
by
*Looking at the matter from the point
of view of practical embryology, the so-called cures” of cancer by surgical
operation are probably in all cases without exception examples of the “cure”
of a benign tumour, a more or less reduced “ embryoma.” Naturally benign
tumours are of common occurrence, and whether diagnosed by microscopical
examination or only clinically, the diagnosis of cancer is not one which can be
regarded as conforming to a scientific criterion. When one thinks of the
extraordinary frequency of recurrence after surgical operation, one can only
conclude that, in the absence of the crucial stereo-chemical tests, either of
adequate injections of sufficiently potent preparations of trypsin and
amylopsin, or of examination of the tumour albumins by means of the
polarimeter, at present there is no valid evidence extant that operation has
ever cured a single case of malignant disease, though it may quite well have
induced it. as the X rays have often done. Sir James Paget, a scientific