Soft Medullary or Encephaloid cancer. This type resembles brain tissue both in appearance and consistence. It appears quite soft and may be mistaken for an abscess. In form, it differs according to the organ attacked. Special seats: The testicle, liver, bladder, kidney, ovary, the eye and more rarely the breast.
Colloid cancer; jelly-like substance.—The cancer cells have undergone a degeneration in one of the preceding varieties. The material it contains is a semi-translucent, glistening, jelly-like substance. Its special seats are the stomach, bowel, omentum, ovary and, occasionally, the breast.
Diagnosis.—This kind is very rare before thirty years of age and common after forty. They involve the gland early, contrary to what the sarcoma variety does. Innocent growths occur, as a rule, in younger patients, do not grow so rapidly, do not become adherent to neighboring parts and do not ulcerate.
2. The Epithelial Cancer (Carcinoma).—These always spring from free epithelium-clad surfaces, as the skin, and mucous membranes or from the glands of the same. These growths appear with great frequency at the points of junction of mucous membranes and skin surfaces, probably because these parts are subjected to more frequent and varied forms of mechanical and chemical irritation, Special seats: Skin surfaces, the nose, the lower lip, the penis and scrotum, the vulva, the anus (mucous surfaces), tongue, palate, gums, tonsils, larynx, pharynx, gullet, bladder, womb.
[336 MOTHERS' REMEDIES]
MOTHERS' REMEDIES.—l. Cancer, Simple Remedy for.—"Give a teaspoonful of sarsaparilla tea four times daily, made with two ounces of sarsaparilla root and quart of water boiled to one pint and apply to cancer growth a poultice made of carrots scraped or mashed cranberries." These simple remedies will relieve and often cure growths taken for cancers, but if it is really a cancerous growth no medicine will help and a physician should be consulted at once.
2. Cancer, Nettles and Laudanum Will Help.—"Take the juice of common nettles inwardly and mix a little laudanum with the juice and rub the parts outwardly. Cancer has often yielded to this treatment." This remedy will no doubt help an ugly looking ulcer, repeatedly taken for cancer, by the patients themselves and frequently the doctor. It is always well to give this simple home remedy a trial, at least, for it is frequently admitted by the medical fraternity to-day that ugly ulcers are often treated in this way as cancers, sometimes to the lasting detriment of the sufferer. Then why not try some efficient home remedy like the above until you are certain that it is a cancer?
TUMORS.—A tumor is a new growth which produces a localized enlargement of a part, or an organ, has no tendency to a spontaneous cure, has no useful function, in most cases tends to grow during the whole of the individual's life. Clinically, tumors are divided into the benign and the malignant.
A benign tumor is usually composed of tissues, resembling those in which it originates.
A malignant tumor usually consists of tissues widely different from those in which it originates; its growth is rapid and therefore often painful; it infiltrates all the surrounding tissues, however resistant, even bone, because it is never encapsulated; it thus early becomes immovable; the overlying skin is apt to become adherent, especially when the breast is involved. Sooner or later it usually infects the group of lymphatic glands intervening between it and the venous circulation and from these new centres, or directly through the veins, gives rise to secondary deposits in the internal organs.