Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The works of John Hunter / edited by James F. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![be preferred, and it is right in this case to have the cure in view as soon as the operation is done, although we should be sure to remove the whole disease. These principles attended to will be sufficient to guide us in the management of cancers in other parts of the body. Of Fungated Sores.—These are commonly called cancers, and are similar to them in being incurable, although they differ in other re- spects. The cancer eats, as it were, away parts, though there is still an increase ot growth or tumefaction ; but in fungated sores there is a spongy fungus which cannot be kept down. It is, in fact, a specific well-marked disease, which appears common to every part, which I be- lieve the cancer is not. I have seen it in the antrum, the tibia, the eye, the testicle, and the rectum. Its beginning, I believe, is in the form of a tumour, both of the encysted and solid kind ; for I have seen an encysted tumour opened which threw out this fungus, which is very soft, spongy, and pulpy, of a dirty black colour, very easily torn, and very apt to bleed: the matter does not seem to be poisonous, for the glands and absorbents never appear to be diseased by it. Here [exhibiting it] is a preparation to show the disease on the sole of the foot, and here another, of the tunica vaginalis, in which the fungus was very extensive, as was also this fungus on the penis. A woman had a large one on the upper part of the foot, for which I amputated the leg, and in this case the glands in the groin were not affected, and she recovered, which shows there was no poison to contaminate by absorption. A man had a swelled testicle, which was not very painful, and the cord was not affected, which led me to think that it was scrofulous: the scrotum became af- fected by local sympathy, and adhered to the testicle. I removed the testicle, but not entirely the adhering skin, and after some time a fun- gus arose from the skin, and his health became impaired by the repeated haemorrhage. I tried arsenic made into troches with flour, which were stuck into the fungus, but still these did not destroy it sufficiently, and the man afterwards died. If this had been cancerous the progress would have been different, for the skin would have become cancerous from contamination, and the cord would probably have been affected in the same way. On dissection of this fungus from the cicatrix of the old skin the glands above were found sound. This species of fungus is pretty regular in structure ; it is striated, and radiated, and its external surface is larger than that of the surface of contact. Nothing is left for it but to remove it, no natural cure being known; but we should be careful to remove the whole of the diseased parts that have the dispo- sition, as they will otherwise soon take on the action. It kills without appearing to have done much mischief, whereas cancer does much local mischief, and so do the consequent ones, before death. The first case](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21996623_0001_0660.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
