INTRODUCTION 25
The
first and only reasons advanced by me publicly at Liverpool, now six years ago
to the day, for the use of pancreatic ferments in cancer, were that at a
certain period of development every normal embryo, or soma, or sexual
individual, commenced to suppress the trophoblast or asexual generation of
normal development. This came to pass by the initiation of the functioning of
the sweetbread or pancreas-gland, with its powerful ferments, the two chief of
which are trypsin and amylopsin.
Some
imaginary relation of diabetes to cancer, or some suspected failure or “fault “
on the part of the sweetbread or pancreas gland, had nothing at all to do with
the reasons—as little as had the discovery a little later on, by Blumenthal and
Wolff, that trypsin easily digests
** (cont from pg24) trypsin acts upon dextro - albumins,
of what use is it in the ordinary adult body, seeing that the albumins of human
food are laevo-albumins ?“ No more than
Nature does would I separate amylopsin in its action from trypsin, for, like
Nature. we must associate the two ferments. Trypsin and amylopsin, acting upon
the dead laevo-albumins of our food-stuffs Trypsin only pulls these down to a
limited extent, converting them into substances capable of absorption, and on
these amylopsin has no action. These are built up again into living
laevo-albumins by cell ferments in the body-cells. Trypsin and amylopsin acting
upon the living dextro-rotatory albumins of asexual generation or cancer:
Trypsin at once attacks these, and pulls them down into quite other bodies than
those which it forms from dead laevo-albumins. These bodies, or some of them,
are rank poisons to the human body, but, as they are further acted upon by
amylopsin, and by it pulled down into simple, harmless products, the two
ferments, trypsin and amylopsin, acting here together. pull down the
cancer-albumins completely. Whereas, as we have seen, amylopsin has no action
upon the products of the tryptic digestion of laevo-albumins, these products of
the action of trypsin are chemically relatively highly organized, and can be
used as food by the cells of the body. This is not the case with the products,
to which the action of trypsin and amylopsin on cancer-albumins, living or
dead, gives rise. He who doubts the truth of the above had better, before
publishing his doubts, study the recent work of Professor Abderhalden and his
pupils.