168 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER
—for
have not several thousand medical men now in practice passed through my hands
as pupils ?—what else could lie expected, than that with a very little
knowledge, or with none at all, adverse verdicts should he pronounced upon the
thing without any delay to examine the scientific evidences ?
So
little scientific care is, as a rule, bestowed upon the publication of the
results of the enzyme treatment that, notwithstanding the publication of
semi-popular accounts of my work in the Lancet and the Medical
Record, I have never yet read an accurate description* of the scientific
basis of the matter from a medical pen in the pages of any medical newspaper.
Most of the medical writers appeared not even to know what trophoblast was. It
would he an easy, not to add an instructive, task to show that my work on the
germinal origin and trophoblastic nature of cancer, with all its consequences
(trypsin and amylopsin). differed in no way in the reception it encountered at
the hands of the medical profession from previous discoveries recorded in the
history of medicine. have the names and labours of Pasteur, Lister, Morton, and
Corvisart—to name but a few—been forgotten?
Scientific
objections, which might have been raised, but which were never produced until
it was too late, have been noted by others. Here I will add a new one.
According to my finds, in any normal human gestation, Nature only allows the
equivalent of cancer—trophoblast
—to
grow for a little less than seven weeks before she introduces the suppressing
and destroying ferment or ferments. This is a point which should be borne in
mind,
* There is one
surgical exception to this. In the Appendix of his book, The Control of a Scourge”
(pp. 293 et seq.), Mr. C. P. Childe, B.A., F.R.C.S., gives
a correct scientific account of the pre-embryonic or trophoblastic theory ‘‘
of cancer.