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    12                                   THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

 

cancer incurable, but it was a disease of the nature and origin of which the whole of the medical profession, by its own confession, often proclaimed by leading surgeons in public orations, knew nothing at all about. Under such circumstances it could hardly be strange that it should not be in conformity with the generally accepted, when a scientific man, who knew very well what he was speaking about, and who, like Pasteur, had earned the right to an opinion by his investigations of many long years, announced that cancer was not a disease, but a natural phenomenon, that it was germinal in origin and asexual (trophoblastic) in nature. This was all something new, which I had never been said before by anyone, living or dead. I might turn out to be wrong, but also it might prove true. As at the present time we were supposed, but possibly erroneously, to have outlived the Dark Ages, and as, at all events, those who made me, the scientific Germans, who have advanced far beyond the Dark Ages, had long advocated and practised “ the freedom of science in the modern state,’’ it was something to be examined scientifically. It is interesting to see how this was realized in Germany.

A recent part of the German Journal of Cancer Investigation (vol. x., part 1) contains the report of a special Cancer Congress, Held in May, 1910. Here Professor C. Neuberg, well known for his researches in to the chemistry of cancer, writes on p. 70 regarding the position of chemistry in cancer research in words which recall Duclaux’s de­claration concerning chemistry and medicine. Neuberg affirms that where time problems of the nature of tumours are in question, chemistry will never retreat from the field of conflict.. Duclaux said ‘‘ With Pasteur chemistry took possession of medicine. It is easy to foresee that she will never loosen her hold upon it.” As a study of

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