The application of experiment to the study of cancer / by E.F. Bashford.

  • Bashford, Ernest Francis, 1873-
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The application of experiment to the study of cancer / by E.F. Bashford. 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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    venience; since secondary bacterial infections are inimical to the objects of the experiments, they are carefully avoided. As will be explained below, the transference of cancer differs funda- mentally from the transference of any known infective disease. Peyrilhe’s experiment may, however, be held to have been positive, in that he had produced artificially what were then regarded as the particular features of the “cancerous virus.” The repetition of Peyrilhe’s experiment to-day could not be justified as a means of throwing light on the nature of cancer. Peyrilhe was under the influence of Descartes’ lymphatic theory, as were his contemporaries Alexander Monro and John Hunter in this country. He was ignorant of the true structure both of cancer and of the healthy tissues, and the “cancerous virus” itself was nothing more than the consequences of the action of the organisms of putrefaction on the tissues. It was not till one hundred years later that Lister’s experiments on wound infections demonstrated conclusively that this was so. Progress was about to be made along unsuspected lines, and during a century the valuable additions to knowledge of the nature of cancer remained almost entirely descriptive. The developments of normal and pathological anatomy, of histology and of experimental physiology, riveted attention. They yielded, as the end result, criteria of the minute structure and nature of cancer absolutely different from those by which the success of Peyrilhe’s experiment had been tested. The “cancerous virus” survived; but had already acquired a changed and vaguer connotation, when, in 1840, Langenbeck found solid nodules— new formations of tissue—develop in the lungs of animals after inoculating them with cancerous tissue from a human breast. Those nodules were taken to imply that the animals had become infected from human cancer, as the nodules in Villemin’s experi- ments (1865) were interpreted—as we now know, correctly—to mean the infection of rabbits by the inoculation of tuberculous matter from the human subject. The significance of the many resemblances of cancerous to healthy tissues was still unappreciated. It was long in being fully comprehended. Its importance received occasional emphasis early in England, e.g. by Pott, Abernethy, Wardrop, Astley Cooper, Walshe, Hodgkin, Everard Home, Carswell, Wilks, and others, and was fully recognised by Johannes Muller and his pupil Virchow. In 1868 Wilks emphasised how this similarity