Cancer: Its Cause and Treatment, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Lucius Duncan Bulkley

3. The exclusion of all other possible causes leads us naturally to look to a disordered metabolism as a cause of the disturbed action of the hitherto normal cells; and we find much to confirm this view both in laboratory studies on the biochemistry of cancer, and also in clinical and statistical observations.

4. The blood in advancing cancer has repeatedly been shown to exhibit many manifest changes, which indicate vital alteration in the action of the organs which form blood, and so control the nutrition of the body and its cells.

5. Laboratory and clinical evidence demonstrate that the secretions and excretions of the body, both in early and late stages of cancer, exhibit departures from normal which deserve consideration. Although not one of these has as yet been established as pathognomonic of cancer, they all indicate metabolic disturbances which influence the nutrition of the cellular elements, and so these secretory and excretory disturbances are of importance in connection with its causation.

6. As all healthy cells of the body, by their catabolism and anabolism contribute a hormone or something to the general circulation, so experimental evidence shows that the cells of a cancer mass itself, when fully developed, secrete a hormone or something which is poisonous to animals, and which probably hastens the lethal progress of the disease.

7. Repeated laboratory experiences have demonstrated, in a most remarkable manner, the absolute controlling effect of diet on the development of inoculated cancer in mice and rats, so that the process was inhibited almost entirely with certain vegetable feedings.

8. We thus see that as the laboratory has eliminated the local nature of cancer, it has also, in a measure, established the fact that there are medical aspects of the disease which further studies will show to be of the utmost importance. These all tend to demonstrate its constitutional origin, that is, its relation to deranged metabolism, which is now recognized as the basis of so many diseases of more or less serious character.

But clinical and statistical studies come in with overwhelming force to confirm the correctness of this position.

1. We have already seen that with utter medical neglect the death rate of cancer has steadily and greatly increased in the United States, of late years, in spite of the prodigious advances of surgery during the same time. This is also true in all the countries from which we have any accurate statistics. We know also that tuberculosis, as a result of careful medical attention, has decreased in mortality by almost as great a percentage as cancer has increased. The same is reported by reliable observers all over the civilized world.

2. Any number of observers, in many lands, have recorded the almost entire absence of cancer among aborigines, living simple lives, largely vegetarian; they have also shown the definite increase in the disease, and in its mortality, in proportion to their adoption of the customs and diet of so-called modern civilization.

3. This increase of cancer mortality seems to depend largely upon the altered conditions of life attending advanced civilization, particularly along the lines of self-indulgence in eating and drinking and in indolence.