INTRODUCTION 9
amount
to more than 6o,ooo tryptic units and 120,000 amylolytic ones. That is to say,
for his last published case the strengths and doses of injections employed
during the vital period of the treatment can be stated. This can be said also
only of the report of Messrs. Ball and Thomas. Dr. Bainbridge, according to his
own statements, used injections of live strengths of trypsin, but in his report
he does not discriminate among these, or give figures from which even
approximate calculations, or any at all, can be made. All of those in this
country, or elsewhere, who, publicly or privately, have condemned the
treatment, with the single exception mentioned above, whatever its scientific
value, have furnished no particulars of strengths or doses and of the total
number of injections exhibited; in fact, not one of them has given a scientific
verdict, for not one of them has produced any evidences that he ever employed
any ferments whatever. In 1906 and 1907 the statement was often made by several
very prominent London surgeons to private patients that they had “tried “
trypsin in cancer, but had found it “ useless.” They themselves knew nothing at
all about the preparations used, but actually this adverse verdict was given
after the employment of preparations containing at that time less than 10
tryptic units per cubic centimetre or ampoule.* This should be
* The first
injections of “trypsin” employed in 1906 were all, or nearly all, made tip from
Fairchild Brothers and Foster’s “trypsin in powder.” This, which is no longer
on sale anywhere. was a very potent preparation, and it had been on the market
for many years. At the beginning of April, 1906, the manufacturers of this
“trypsin in powder,” as they announced by advertisements in the chief British
medical and chemical newspapers, withdrew it from sale. This step placed other
makers of ”trypsin injections” upon their own resources, or very largely so.
There was already a “famine in the land” as regards “trypsin.” so much of one
that I heard through friends of several cancer patients who were being treated
with raw sweetbreads,