GENERAL DIRECTIONS 191
if
not hundreds, of those in this country who, if asked, would give an adverse
opinion of the pancreatic enzymes in cancer have never even employed them. This
may be illustrated.
A
former pupil, a physician in this city, has urged that the medical man is bound
to trust to chemists for his drugs, etc., and as an instance he cited
digitalis. To which the reply was obvious. If a physician, using digitalis, did
not get the reaction he anticipated, he would naturally suspect the
preparation, and would inquire as to its true chemical character, but he would
not, in the absence of the expected reaction, condemn the use of digitalis.
This, however, has been done again and again with preparations of trypsin (and
amylopsin), in the absence of any proof or knowledge that the preparations
used contained any enzymes whatever. It is illogical and absurd to condemn a
scientific treatment, as some eminent surgeons in London have done, when it was
the preparations employed by them which needed their censure.
Early
in July, 1909, I spent several hours in the society of a well-known Glasgow
operating surgeon, who volunteered the information that he had used “trypsin”
in cancer, but had gathered a poor opinion of it. “It all depends upon what you
used,” I said. He named certain preparations at one time much advertised. “
Well,” I answered, “as to those preparations, in 1906-07, when quite fresh, if
they contained any active ferments at all it was only pure trypsin, and they
were so made up that a box of them would be inert in fourteen days or less;
indeed, they had no keeping properties at all. At times, as I happen to know,
they were exported to the Cape, but it is inconceivable that they could have
been in the least active by the time they crossed the Equator.”