118 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
commencing
functional activity of the pancreas which initiates the degenerative changes in
the asexual generation. At this epoch, the critical period, the fish commences
to feed itself on yolk, not by an (intracellular) acid “peptic” digestion, but
by an alkaline pancreatic one. In some of the textbooks of physiology stands
the statement that the human pancreas at birth “contains trypsin and the
fat-decomposing ferment, but not the diastatic one “* (Zweifel); but, as I know
from my comparative observations of years past, its activities really commence
at the time the anus is formed, early in the seventh week of gestation, at a
period when in the days of long ago the organism would have begun to digest the
yolk of its now empty yolk-sac. The pancreas functions throughout foetal life
in a mammal, though it has nothing to digest except the trophoblast.
During
foetal life the pancreas gland is pouring out its secretion into an intestine
which at the present day contains no food to be digested, for the food of the
foetus (has been prepared by the pancreatic digestion of the ‘mother. To the
foetus in utero this alkaline digestion is of no direct use, but it has
an indirect import in acting upon trophoblast. The commencing activities of the
pancreas during foetal life initiate an alkaline digestion by means of the most
powerful and important of all the digestive juices. To which of its ferments
the observed results be due does not concern us.** If the secretion be
* The diastatic ferment
is, of course, amylopsin. Here, therefore, on the first appearance in a
medical journal of an advocacy of pancreatic ferments in cancer, amylopsin is
noted, and its absence at birth mentioned along with the name of Zweifel as the
discoverer of this fact.
** The writer had intended, in correcting the proof for the Lancet, to
insert the following note, which was actually spoken at Liverpool on January
20, 1905: ‘As my work of past years has revealed, at the critical period the
embryo, complete in all (continued p 119)