Castration v. Cancer

That women who expect to develop cancer of the breast should have their ovaries destroyed by knife, X-ray or radium was a suggestion which Dr. Wallace Edgar Herrell of the Mayo Clinic last week proposed in the American Journal of Cancer. His theory: female sex hormones affect the breast; mice deprived of their sex hormones do not develop cancer of the breast; cancer of the breast improves in some women after ooephorectomy (castration).

Dr. Herrell's facts: among the women patients of the Mayo Clinic, breast cancer is rare among those who have been castrated, common among those who have not.

Tied up with fact and theory is the dictum of Prof. Maud Slye, Chicago mouse-breeding geneticist: that cancer of the breast runs in families. Also tied up with all this is the probability that, if castration actually prevents mammary cancer, the operation must be performed at least three years before the disease is expected to break out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.