CHAPTER
III
THE
PROBLEMS OF CANCER*
UNDER this title the following remarks were published in the Lancet
in 1904 as a summary of a University lecture. The objects in view
were to throw some embryological light on the possible lack of import of a
practical kind attaching to certain recently published observations on
so-called “heterotypic” mitoses or cell-divisions in cancer-cells; to point to
the futility of regarding carcinoma as due in origin to some sort of
“conjugation” of leucocytes of the body; and, lastly, while insisting upon the
fundamental identity of carcinoma and sarcoma, to indicate how the problems of
cancer finally ended embryo-logically in those of identical twins and their
origin. The import, or absence of import, of the first two—the “heterotype” mitoses
and the supposed “conjugation” —has now been generally recognized, and the
original position taken up regarding these has been abandoned by official
cancer research in Great Britain. As pointed out by Dr. Jacob Wolff (“ Die
Lehre von der Krebskrankheit,” vol. i., p. 438), this view of the “conjugation
of resting nuclei “—one of them that of a leucocyte—was enunciated originally
by Auerbach in 1890, but this fact escaped the notice of the official
researchers.
*The Lancet, October, 29,
1904.
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