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