The Cancer Research Institute / by J.G. Adami.

  • John George Adami
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Cancer Research Institute / by J.G. Adami. 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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    substance with various radicals, and with his patho- logical assistants tests the relative value of these new compounds seriatim upon animals of the laboratory inoculated with the disease in question. The research may be most laborious; hundreds of compounds may have to be devised, tested, and rejected, but it is a reasonable expectation that gradually in the course of all these trials certain groupings or radicals will be encountered present- ing definite and specific action upon one or other phase of the particular morbid process, and that eventually some permutation or combination of such substance or substances will be discovered which will effectively destroy the causative agent within the tissues, or arrest the morbid process without coincident grave injury to the tissues of the individual. As all know, this is the method which is being followed by Wassermann and his ■coadjutors at the present moment at the Berlin ■Gesundheitsamt, and that with a certain measure of reported success in regard to cancer of the ani- mals of the laboratory. It is a method which dees not wait for preliminary studies upon the etiology and life history of cancerous and other new growths; it is a purely therapeutic method, even if at the same time purely experimental. But it is by means of the other or indirect method that scientific medicine in our generation has scored its most notable triumphs. It is the friethod based upon the old Baconian aphorism. “Vere scire est per causas scire” ; it is the etiological method. It may be laid down with a confidence so absolute that it becomes a truism that the ex- traordinary advances that have been made in the treatment and control of tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other infections during the last thirty years date from the moment at which the causative agents of these diseases became determined, or, failing that (as in the case of yellow fever), date from the time when, employing rigid analogv, the nature of the disease became realized; that is to