Cancer : its classification and remedies / by J.W. Bright.

  • Bright, J. W.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cancer : its classification and remedies / by J.W. Bright. 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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    knowledged failures,you are cried down as an impostor, a quack, or a charlatan. Let this shame rest no longer on the escutcheon of our noble profession. The treatment of cancer is one of acknowledged difficulty. So is the treatment of Asiatic cholera. Nevertheless the physician does not refuse to seek for a remedy for that awful disease. So with scarlatina, a disease that has slain its millions. How many new modes of treatment are constantly handed forth to the profession, the reader of the medical journals can testify. Yet no one is called in question for that; but let him only make an effort to leave the old beaten track of treating cancer, and he is immediately cried down, and set at naught by the envious (only) of the profession. Let us be not weary in well doing, we shall reap, if we faint not, and thousands will rise up and call us blessed. On the average duration of life in patients with scirrhous cancer of the breast. James Paget, Esq., F. R. S., assistant surgeon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in a lecture delivered in 1852, at the Royal College of Surgeons, made a statement that the average dura- tion of life in those cases, was thirteen months longer when the dis- ease was left to itself than when it was removed by operation. More extended experience from the averages of a greater number of cases shows that this is not correct. We therefore insert a more nearly accurate statement of the average duration of life in both cases. Mr. ]*aget says, Records which I have made, or collected of 139 cases of scirrhous cancer of the breast, watched to their conclu- sions, or to their survivals beyond the average duration, gives the following results: In seventy-five cases not submitted to operation, the average duration of life, after the patient's first observation of the disease, has been forty-eight months. In sixty-four cases submitted to operation, and surviving its immediate consequences, the correspond- ing average has been a little more than fifty-two months. The longest duration of life in the former class has been 26 months, in the latter class 146 months. The shortest, in the former, was seven months, in the latter, seven-and a-half.