Cancer Week

Home from the International Cancer Congress in Madrid Dr. James Ewing, director of cancer research at Manhattan's Memorial Hospital and foremost U. S. cancer authority, found cancer patients and physicians still in a hubbub over the Press's garbling of a paper he had read to the Congress. In an effort to erase from public memory such headlines as CANCER CURE AIM IS CALLED ABSURD and SAYS NUDISM BREEDS CANCER, Dr. Ewing last week issued a statement on cancer for laymen. Excerpts :

"The statement that 'the idea of discovering a cure for cancer is absurd' should have read: 'The idea of discovering a single universal cure for all cancers is absurd.' . . .

"The word nudism does not appear in my paper. I know nothing about nudism. Yet there is a modern tendency to bold and repeated exposure of the body to wind, and especially to sunlight, which, carried to excess, produces some cancers of the skin directly and causes chronic changes in the skin of many subjects which eventually lead to cancer of the skin. . . . Every physician knows that farmers and seamen are especially prone to develop skin cancer. . . ."

Thesis of his Madrid address, explained Dr. Ewing, was that laymen and physicians are thinking too much about curing cancer, not enough about preventing it. Only 35% of cancer cases (skin, lip, mouth, breast, uterus) are readily curable. The rest are internal, inaccessible, difficult to treat. Despite advances in public education and curative and diagnostic technique, cancer mortality is nowhere decreasing.*

Check. In Cambridge. Mass, last week Dr. James B. Murphy (Rockefeller Institute) told the National Academy of Sciences how he had concentrated a mysterious substance from rapidly-growing tissue--placenta and embryo skin--of rabbits and mice, shot it into other rabbits and mice suffering from one form of cancer (carcinoma). In most cases the cancerous growth was arrested. A substance concentrated from chicken tumors checked another type of cancer (sarcoma). The inhibitors have not been tried on cancerous human beings.

Cancer "Cures." Good news to enemies of quack cancer "cures" were two court actions last week. In St. Louis three years ago Mrs. G. W. Haggard discovered a pea-sized lump in her right breast. A surgeon advised an immediate operation. More attractive was the prospect held out by Drs. John E. and Edward C. Westaver, father & son, who promised a cure with their salves at $2 a treatment. After nine months in their care Mrs. Haggard died. In St. Louis medical experts testified that dallying with the worthless Westaver nostrums had cost her a chance of recovery through proper treatment. A jury last week awarded her husband $6,500 damages against the Drs. Westaver.

Last winter Mrs. Cora Britten of Elliott. Md. became convinced that she had cancer of the breast. A friend told her about Dr. Harlow R. Street, who conducts a "cancer sanatorium" at his Washington home, has a "secret salve" to devour cancer. Against her physician-husband's advice Mrs. Britten went to the Chevy Chase, Md. home of Dr. Street's partner, Dr. Nathan Sherwood Ferris, for treatment. She spent nine weeks there, two days in a Baltimore hospital before she died.

Hospital examiners found no trace of cancer. But it was conceded that Dr. Street's salve, which had eaten through her breast, charred her ribs, penetrated a lung, might well have destroyed the cancer too. A coroner's jury returned a verdict of "criminal conduct, gross malpractice and brutal treatment." Last week in Rockville, Md.. Drs. Street and Ferris were indicted for manslaughter.

* Last fortnight Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. announced that the U. S. cancer mortality rate in 1932 was up 3.2% from 1931, 5% from 1930.

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