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Weapon. Also last week, Professor Major Gabriel Seelig of Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, took charge of the enlarged Cancer research program of Barnard Free Skin & Cancer Hospital in St. Louis. Last June Dr. Seelig, 56, retired from active practice. He is devoting the rest of his able life to fighting Cancer and to making Barnard Hospital one of the six $10,000,000 centres which Dr. Ewing says are the essential weapons for eradication of this omnipresent scourge of humans (and other animals) and plants.
What Cancer Is. When the frog of the fable, trying to grow as big as the ox, inflated himself until he burst, he exhibited what might be called cancer of ambition. His ambition grew beyond restraint.
Cancer is unrestrained growth of cells in one or more parts of the body. Something, no one knows what, starts the cells growing riotously. They grow so abundantly that they choke and kill normal cells nearby. Often they leave a framework of blood vessels, which the ancients thought resembled the claws of a crab (hence the zodiac sign). Vigorous cancer cells from the main growth eat into the lymph and blood streams and drift away until they find some hospitable spot in the body. There they set up a secondary cancer.
Every part of the body is susceptible to Cancer, bones as well as flesh. One out of eight women who reach the age of 40, and one out of twelve men, develop Cancer. Women develop Cancer most often in the uterus and its appendages,* next most frequently in the breasts. Cancer of the stomach attacks men most often. When and where clay pipes, which conduct the heat of smoking, were popular, men often developed Cancer of the lips or tongue. Emperor Frederick II of Germany (a pipe smoker) and President Ulysses Simpson Grant of the U. S. (a cigar smoker) had cancer of the throat. President Grover Cleveland had cancer of the mouth, caused probably by the irritation of an ill-fitting dental plate rather than by heavy smoking.
Cancer does not at first cause the victim pain. It gives no warning. Hence its insidious danger. But when Cancer flourishes in a body, and the body begins to waste away, the pain passes description. Only drugs, fortitude of soul or aversion to suicide will keep the patient alive during the few months that a flourishing cancer allows him.
However, most cases of Cancer can be cured, if attacked early.
Signs of Cancer. Of every hundred deaths in the U. S., eight are caused by Cancer. Third most deadly U. S. disease, in some European countries it is Death's prime agent. It definitely is increasing in civilized countries.
Because Cancer can be cured, if attacked in its early stages, the great effort of men like Professor James Ewing is to teach the public to be calmly suspicious (but not afraid) of body irregularities and to teach doctors to diagnose such irregularities properly and early.