As regards the influence of chronic inflammations and irritation, much can be done, and here is our most hopeful field for prevention. Warts and birthmarks that are in any way subject to pressure or friction from clothing or movements should be promptly removed, as both show a distinctly greater tendency than normal tissue to develop into cancer. Cracks, fissures, chafes, and ulcers of all sorts, especially about the lips, tongue, mammary gland, uterus, and rectum, should be early and aseptically dealt with. Jagged remnants of teeth should be removed, all suppurative processes of the gums antiseptically treated, and the whole mouth-parts kept in a thoroughly aseptic condition.
Thorough and conscientious attention to this sort of surgical toilet work is valuable, not only for its preventive effect,—which is considerable,—but also because it will insure the bringing under competent observation at the earliest possible moment the beginnings of true cancer.
For the disease itself, after it has once started, there is, like treason in the body-politic, but one remedy—capital punishment. Parleying with the rebels is worse than useless. Pastes, caustics, X-rays, trypsin, radium,—all are fatally defective, because they suppress a symptom only and leave the cause untouched. Only in one form of surface-cancer, the so-called flat-celled or rodent ulcer, which has little or no tendency to form spore-cells and attack the deeper organs, are they effective.
Nothing is easier and nothing more idle than to destroy and break down cells which have actually become cancerous; but so long as there remains in the body a single nest, or even cell, of the organ in which the revolt started, so long the life of the patient is in danger.
Absolutely the only remedy which is of the slightest value is complete removal with the knife. The one superiority of the knife, shudder as we may at the name of it, over every other means of removal lies solely in this fact, that with it can be removed not merely the actual cancer, but the entire gland or group of surrounding cells in which this malignant, parricidal change has begun to occur.
The modern radical operations for cancer take not merely the tumor, but the entire diseased breast, for instance, and all the lymph-glands into which it drains, clear up into the armpit, with the muscles beneath it down to the ribs. Where this is done early enough, the disease does not recur. Such radical and complete amputation of an organ or region as this is possible in from two-thirds to three-fourths of all cases if seen reasonably early.
With watchfulness and courage, our attitude toward the cancer problem is one of hopeful confidence.