4 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
A
surgeon, who published as a “ scientific report” an account of the failure of
the enzyme treatment at his hands in a large series of (mostly very advanced)
cases, remarked to the writer not long ago that a single case of success would
not prove his thesis. The exact opposite of this assertion has been maintained
quite recently by the Moseley Professor of Surgery in Harvard University,
Boston, Dr. Maurice H. Richardson. In the Journal of the American Medical
Association, February 4, 1911, in an article upon “The Operative Treatment of
Cancer of the Breast” (p. 315), he writes: “And yet I am full of enthusiasm in
the hope that the near future or the next method will solve the problem. One
single total disappearance of undoubted breast cancer under any form of
non-operative treatment will presage success, just as surely as a successful
man-flight presaged aviation.” A little further on he adds : “ One varies,
perhaps, in the positiveness of one’s opinion. One’s diagnosis may be an
absolute conviction. I have often said—and I here repeat—that the diagnosis of
cancer by gross appearance, plus the history, made by an experienced man is
more worthy of credence in some cases than the microscopic examination alone.”
Everything of import here named by Professor Richardson has been fulfilled to
the letter. In 1908 Captain Lambelle gave the enzyme treatment, as laid down by
him further on in this book, in a case of “encephaloid “* cancer of the breast.
The patient was a Yorkshire lady of social position. The diagnosis was made by
“ experienced men,” as well as by Lambelle himself. There was no operation and
no microscopical examination. In his last letter to me, dated December 1,
* ” Encephaloid
cancer,” a term used by pathologists to define soft cancer from hard cancer, or
scirrhus. Encephaloid cancer is so termed because of its brain-like softness.
It is described as quick-growing arid rapidly fatal (see Appendix L).