INTRODUCTION 43
connection
a confession on p. 451 of von Baer’s “ Autobiography” (second edition, 1886)
is of great interest. Here, in a review of his own published embryological
researches, he writes “ Und der Generations-Wechsel schleuderte mich ganz
zurück” (And the alternation of generations threw me right back). As the reader
will find in a subsequent chapter, there are grounds for supposing that the
like difficulties connected with alternation of generations interfered with
the researches of another great embryologist, Johannes Muller. It required, in
fact, the later botanical investigations of Hofmeister and others to furnish a
new basis for attacking this fundamental problem of alternation of generations
in animals. Sixty years after von Baer published his investigations I began
mine—in the summer of 1888. These researches certainly lasted far longer than
his, and their completion only came nearly twenty years later, with the final
overthrow and rout of cancer. This latter, including the physical fact of the
actual liquefaction of living cancer in the living human body, and embracing
the true cure of malignant disease in the single case—a test one for all
time—of Lambelle’s ex-drummer in York, has a far wider import and deeper
hearing than its applications in medicine, and for the welfare of humanity. The
scientific investigator is bound, on occasion, to divest himself of his humanity,
and to look at his problems and their solutions in cold-blooded fashion. He
must draw the conclusions, even though the heavens fall. ‘This I shall now
proceed to do in brief, reserving a fuller treatment for some other place and
occasion.
For
the past century, to go no farther back, innumerable attempts have been
made—all in vain—to solve the problems of cancer, or malignant disease. In Dr.
Jacob Wolff’s monumental work, “Die Lehre