The old methods of treating cancer compared with the new / by John Pattison.

  • Pattison, John.
Date:
[1857]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The old methods of treating cancer compared with the new / by John Pattison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    “ Can a greater perversion of the first principles of logic exist, than that displayed by observers, who, profoundly impressed with the frequent failure of all methods of cure, assume as their device the constant intractability of the disease; and, when eventually obliged to admit that growths recognised as cancers, do occasionally disappear under the influence of remedies, have recourse to the plea, that the disease in such instances was not rea,lly cancerous because it was cured.”—WalsJie on Cancer, p. 193. It is not my intention at present to enter into the nature of cancer, further than stating, “ That it is a malignant disease, the treatment of which has baffled I he efforts of the most emi- nent surgeons of the present and past times.’^ Although no specific for it has yet been discovered, still some of the modes of treatment adopted for its cure are much more efficacious than others. My intention in this small pamphlet is briefly to men- tion the most common methods of treatment adopted by the profession at the present day for cancer, and to compare the results with my own mode of treating the disease. The first plan adopted was undoubtedly that of excision by the knife, and although the oldest and worst (for we read of it being common in the. days of Hippocrates, Avho wrote against ablation as being useless and dangerous) yet I am sorry to say that it is the most frequent at the present time, especially in this country. The plan of removing the local disease by the knife when the constitution is affected (for I maintain that this scourge is not only local, but always constitutional) is surely not one founded on common sense. Tor we see that abla- tion has the same effect on cancer as pruning a tree or shrub has in the vegetable world,—it either kills it, or it sprouts out more luxuriantly than ever. So in cancer tlic operation, if it does not kill tlie patient, (for we hear of many cases where death has im- mediately followed the o])cralion,) excites the malignant diathesis