When cancer seizes elsewhere one has a sporting chance of holding on to life; but in the stomach which is a fairly large and hollow organ and not plentifully endowed with pain nerves, a malignant growth may grow to an enormous size, when cure is hopeless, without giving any positive symptoms of its existence. In this malady the fallacy of the propaganda for periodic medical examination and early operation as preventive measures against cancer is obvious. Occasionally, however, Nature does give a red light danger signal in the shape of a gastric ulcer, which often is an indication that cancerous developments are near at hand.
All the other cancers in the alimentary tract which occur beyond the stomach, except those of the rectum, are related in the tables to the “intestines”; and there is no information available to show their frequency at its various parts. A very significant fact is generally revealed when such knowledge emerges into daylight. It is found that the great majority of cancers affect the colon and in increasing numbers at each successive flexure culminating in the huge total for the rectum which is always shown separately.
This is in full accordance with their causation from evil food and self poisoning. In the duodenum, jejunum and ileum food is of a milky consistency and is squelched along and absorbed easily without causing any damage to the epithelial lining. The harm from toxic products falls on the liver, and if they escape undestroyed through serious inefficiency in that organ, they may cause diseases of the eye, ear, breast, pancreas or some other place. In the colon, however little absorption beyond water takes place: the food residues solidify, and when retained become very foul especially when the diet contains much meat.
Then the bowel wall degenerates and toxins and bacteria seep constantly into the blood; and often too its delicate lining chiefly in the sigmoid flexure and rectum is injured and scarred by masses of hardened faces. Years of this sort of abuse will cause cancerous developments at least, if in the meantime the body has not perished from some other cause. Trouble in the main canal affects sympathetically the liver and gall bladder which are auxiliary organs of digestion and which have a substantial cancer incidence.
Cancer at the upper end of the alimentary tract (lip, tongue, mouth, jaw, tonsils and pharynx) occurs six times more frequently amongst males than females: cancer of the tongue itself is eleven times more frequent in men, and cancer of the lip seven times. These findings express the results of totalling up the relative figures since the beginning of the Irish Free State. The official luminaries explain away this extraordinary sex predilection by incriminating smoking, lip biting, scratchy teeth, oral hygiene, alcohol, syphilis.
Like much orthodox wisdom it has the inimitable value of being very plausible and at the same time quite wrong. Red Indians, like many other primitive natives, are heavy smokers, and cancer of the buccal cavity is unknown amongst them except where they are in civilized contact with their pale- faced brothers. Teetotallers are frequently involved in this type of affliction. Scratchy teeth are only uncomfortable. Syphilis has never been proved to have any direct connection with cancer, though its arsenic therapy may have. Undoubtedly all these things are more common amongst men than women and probably act as factors which predispose the concentration in this region of the cancer poison which is being manufactured in the intestines.
The frequency of oesophageal cancer especially amongst males is remarkable, and is possibly to a large extent induced by the continual swallowing of hot tea, coffee or soups. Apart from the fact that malignancy may develop in the gullet as being the weakest spot with some people, it has been shown that long repeated flesh burns create a violent toxaemia in the system which can result in cancer. So beware of the advice unfortunately only too common in the daily newspapers which directs the sipping of water as hot as can be borne for the relief of indigestion or as an aid to slimming. Such a habit can result in an early and horrible death.
Cancer of the female organs represents nearly one-third of al the malignant growths that attack women. It is caused like the other cancers by incorrect nutrition and consequent cell instability, but the gross maltreatment of women practised by modern surgeons often directs its location.
Most frequently the breast is the seat of the growth. The question of breast cancer is tremendously important, as it is usually early recognized and treated; and no amount of propaganda is spared by specialists to show how easily nd safely it can be dealt with by the knife. In Dublin some years ago leaflets were actually handed out on the streets advising women with lumps or abnormalities of the breast to come forward immediately for operation. The results of this so called “safest” of operations are damnable.
The unfortunate woman is sent home as “successfully treated” only to die some time later in horrible agony having developed a recurrence of startling malignancy in the operation wound. A lump on the breast should under no circumstances be interfered with by a knife. Nobody living can definitely state that it is cancer, for cancer does not depend on the size, shape, hardness or pain of a lump, but on the resistant quality of the surrounding tissue. A “knotted” breast, however, must never be neglected and should be treated constitutionally, as it is usually a sign of ovarian trouble or a dangerous point of intestinal stasis.
The neck of the womb is the next likely place for a malignant neoplasm to develop, due to repeated lacerations and to the harmful attentions of the stupidest and most unnecessary of all specialists, the gynaecologist. Though, whatever the ill treatment the breast or uterus receives, no cancerous growth will occur unless coincidentally the bodily tissues are in a state of imbalance from faulty feeding and autointoxication.
The ordinary orthodox treatment of cancer is by operation, but every where the leaders of surgery privately think very little of its worth. Dr.Arthur Shadwell writing under “Cancer” on behalf of the orthodox profession in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (13th Edition) says “The only cure for cancer remains removal by operation”, and the word cure is in quotation marks.
Dr. Weedon Cooke, an eminent surgeon who was attached to the Cancer Hospital, London, for twenty years expressed more lucidly what the former authority meant, when he stated “Operations as a cure for cancer are an illusion”. Sir James Paget the great surgeon of a few decades ago whose name is given to a particular diseased condition of the female breast which is precancerous, stated that after operation the number of cases in which the disease did not return was “not more than on in five hundred”.
If these were the only remarks contra-indicating operative measures there would be created a fair presumption against operating and it would show that all was not well in surgical circles regarding disease. But when the number of authorities who have condemned it could be increased one hundred fold and when the frightful results of the knife are glaringly obvious, it makes one feel that nothing less merciful should be used on those who are actively advising ignorant and unfortunate people to submit to mangling and butchery.
Surgeons are divisible into three classes: the first are the foolish and unimaginative tradesmen who think they are fortunate to be in the foremost files of medical advance but who are utterly unsuited by their mentality and training to even remotely connected with the art of healing: the second are unscrupulous individuals who are clever enough to know better and who use their knives on all possible occasions to obtain a fee, assume no other interest in their victims other than seeing that the myocardium is efficient, and risking it occasionally when it is not;
the third are the handful of men who appear in every generation whose education, culture and intelligence rise far above their environment, who deplore the use of the knife when they are directed professionally to use it, and who seek in every possible way to avoid it and to show their patients how to avoid it; many of them eventually abandon orthodox practice and seek in the fields of nature cure or homoeopathy an outlet for their natural instincts of healing.
The first group comprises the vast majority, the second are a large enough proportion of the remainder to keep an instinctive distrust of surgery glowing in the minds of the ordinary people; the third comprise men like Sir Arbuthnot Lane who have soared to the heights of operative skill and technique and at the same time have proclaimed their handiwork as essentially barren and unprofitable.
Hardly less objectionable than operations, as regards the rational treatment of cancer, is the therapeutic use of the various invisible rays of light energy which are found the X-rays and radium emanations. The principles of radioactivity are imperfectly known, and what is known about them does not commend them as of physiological value.
