The diagnosis of surgical cancer / by John Zacharias Laurence.

  • John Zachariah Laurence
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The diagnosis of surgical cancer / by John Zacharias Laurence. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    Warren gives perhaps the most remarkable case on record of cancer running through the members of a family. The grandfather died of a cancer of the lip. The son had a cancer of the breast; two of his sisters had cancer of the breast. A daughter of one of the ladies had a cancer of the breast, which I (Warren) re- moved at an early period; she died some years after of cancer of the uterus. A daughter of the gentleman has a cancer of the breast. Bayle gives several analogous examples, but is by no means disposed to believe in the hereditary nature of cancer as a settled dogma.* M. Lebert states that he sought with much care for hereditary predisposition in 102 cases, and found it in 14 of these patients.! In 49 cases, which I have observed myself, and in which I have specially noted the point, I find 7 cases of an apparent hereditary predisposition to cancer. [Five cases of scirrhus of the breast, one of encephaloid of the soft palate, and one of osteoid cancer of the femur ; in all of which seven cases the patients knew of a blood-relation having died of cancer.] Summing up these cases, we have in 151 cases 21 cases of inherited (1) tendency to cancerous disease: about one-seventh of the total number of cases, or about 14 per cent. This proportion is too small to establish the hereditary nature of cancer; but even this state- * Traite des Maladies Cancereuses. Paris, 1833. t Lebert's Maladies Cancereuses, p. 134. Mr. Paget's statistics I have been obliged to reject, as they include cases of epithelioma—which I do not recognise as cancer.