Cancer

Published last week was the quarterly American Journal of Cancer with 680 pages of cancer news. Items:

Liver No Cause. An idea exists in France and the U. S. that eating liver (invaluable treatment for pernicious anemia) may arouse cancer or stimulate existing cancer. The idea seems to have sprung from research which found that experimental cancers grew faster in liver-fed mice and rats than in rats and mice fed on fresh uncooked muscle, vegetables, wheat or meat. Dr. William Hewy Woglom of Columbia University sought to check this research. He liver-fed seven dozen rats diseased with four kinds of cancers, concluded: "Uncooked beef liver . . . had no demonstrable effect upon the growth of any of these four tumor strains."

Shingles (Herpes zoster) is an inflammation of the sensory nerves caused

1) directly by a filterable virus (probably) which attacks the central nervous system;

2) indirectly by common infectious diseases, injuries, poisons, and sometimes by the spread of cancers. Drs. Lloyd Freeman Craver and Cushman Davis Haagensen of Manhattan's Memorial Hospital have found cases of shingles unexpectedly associated with generalized cancer. They urged clinicians, when the cause of a case of shingles is obscure, to look for a hidden cancer of the lymphatic system.

Black Cancer. An especially pernicious form of cancer called melanoma (black tumor) very often starts from an irritated mole. Full-blooded Negroes (black or brown) whose pigment is evenly distributed over their skins have seemed freer from these melanomata. Dr. Rudolph Matas of New Orleans, who in 1896 wrote on "Surgical Peculiarities of the Negro," believed that this was due to the probability that in the Negro pigment production is a normal function of the skin and under well-developed physiological control, whereas in whites pigment is limited to a few scattered areas and its physiological control is poorly developed. Other investigators believe "that practically all malignant tumors are much more rare in the Negro than in the white race, and that Negroes may even possess a sort of immunity to cancer in general." Of this Dr. Everett Lassiter Bishop of Atlanta was skeptical. In Atlanta's Steiner Cancer Clinic he found as many cancers of the breast and cervix in Negroes as in whites. Young Atlanta Negresses more often than young Atlanta white women have cervical cancer. Thinking that Negroes might have black cancer more often than Dr. Matas et al. believed, Dr. Bishop went hunting for dark moles on full-blooded cancerous Negroes. For clues he looked first at their soles and palms and around their nails where the color is slightly lighter than elsewhere, moles more discernible. He found his moles, proved that the cancers were unsuspected melanomata.

P. P's Lump. A dignified Albino initialed P. P. entered St. Louis' Barnard Free Skin & Cancer Hospital three years ago. His head was thrown back, his shoulders hunched under his ears. He required morphine to dull the aching, burning pain in his head, neck and shoulders. He was, said P. P., 38, single, a farmer. Five years ago he had noticed a small, hard, rounded lump on the back of his neck. It grew to the size of a ripe olive, then rapidly spread, became an open sore. A year ago he had begun to hold his head back, his chin up, to ease the pain in his neck. Now he could not move his head forward. He suffered terrible pains. The muscles of his neck were, say Drs. Ellis Fischel & Louis H. Jorstad who made the report, "woody-hard in consistency. . . . Under local anesthesia a triangular piece of tissue, a quarter of an inch thick and measuring an inch on each side, was removed (from the back) for biopsy. . . . The removal of this tissue was comparable to the removal of a section from a block of wood. . . . Indeed, the removed triangle of tissue could be fitted back into the defect as accurately as if it were a matrix." What ailed Albino P. P. is any pathologist's opinion. First, tentative diagnosis was cancer. Drs. Fischel & Jorstad believe that P. P.'s lump was one vast, complicated sear, result of the sore on his neck.

Jawbones. Within each half of the upper jawbone (maxilla) is a sinus. Here occur one out of every 100 cancers. Dr. William Thomas Peyton of the University of Minnesota discourages mere surgery for the treatment of this cancer because "surgery alone, total excision of the maxilla, carries a high mortality (15% to 40%), and results in very few, if any, permanent cures. With proper combination of surgery and radium five-year cures may be obtained in 10% of all cancers of the antrum coming for treatment."

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