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     172                                 THE ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

 

to-day the sole impediment in the way of the successful transplantation of living trophoblast is the Act of Parlia­ment relating to vivisection.

When Mr. Walter Ball and Mr. B. F. Thomas saw fit to publish an account of how they tried “the trypsin treatment,” to their credit be it said, they did give particulars. as will appear anon, such that a good insight could be obtained into, and an estimate made of what they had really done. The like cannot be said of Dr. Bainbridge’s report. It winds up with thirty theses or conclusions, but the evidences establishing the truth of these are not to be found in the text. This is as true of the favourable points as of the unfavourable ones. The references to the liquefying action of trypsin on cancer-cells, and to the beneficial effects of amylopsin. might seem to refute this, but no evidences of these are adduced anywhere in this” scientific report,” and certainly the writer would feel inclined to doubt them, had he not witnessed them elsewhere again and again.

The liquefaction of cancer, by adequate injections of trypsin, which was first seen by me in actual liquid cancer, taken from living patients by a prominent consulting physician in London, and which I first brought to Dr. Bainbridge’s notice in microscopical preparations of such liquid cancer, is a matter of supreme importance, worthy of much more lengthy reference than the two lines accorded to it in Bainbridge’s report. The facts were first seen on February 26, 1907, and afterwards confirmed in the same case and in another. Since it is quite four years ago that the discovery was made, in the interests

 

(cont from p 171) by the Effects of Excision and Grafting of Ovaries,” in Coll. Rep. Univ. Edin., Physiol. Dept., 1907-08, No. 11 and “Results of Ovarian Transplantation,” in Seventeenth Internat. Congress Physiol., Heidelberg, 1907.

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