Medicine: From the Autumn Crocus

Salves for “curing” cancer of the breast have long been among the most infamous of quack nostrums. Last week a salve got a respectable introduction to some distinguished physicians. At the Fifth International Cancer Congress in Paris, an earnest German scientist reported encouraging results in treating breast cancer with a salve containing a chemical derived from a common garden bulb.

Colchicine (from the autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale) has long been prescribed in the treatment of gout. It attracted the attention of cancer researchers because it is poisonous to living cells, impairs their power to divide. Most cancer workers were disappointed with colchicine and soon dropped it. But Dr. Hans Lettré of the University of Heidelberg persisted. He extracted N-methyl-colchicamid, a substance which proved to be ten times as powerful as colchicine itself in preventing the riotous multiplication of cells (a characteristic of cancer growth).

Fifty patients with breast cancer had been treated for three to four weeks with a salve containing N-methyl-colchicamid, Dr. Lettré told the Paris gathering. In the confusion of postwar Germany he could not keep tabs on them well enough to be sure that any had been free of the disease for five years (the minimum acceptable for a cancer “cure”), but several whose cancers disappeared had been free for three years.