A probationary essay on cancer : submitted ...to the examinationof the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh ... / by George Johnston ... March 1824.

  • Johnston, George, 1797-1855.
Date:
1824
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A probationary essay on cancer : submitted ...to the examinationof the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh ... / by George Johnston ... March 1824. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    with Cancer in the stomach * or uterus, though rare, are every now and then met with. The lamentable want of success in curing Cancer by its removal; the circumstance that patients, even though the disease itself should not return, often die, after the operation, of a general and undefin¬ ed constitutional disturbance -[■; and the heredi¬ tary predisposition to its growth, are other facts which have been stated as extremely favourable to the doctrine. They who contend that Cancer is a local dis¬ ease, as much so at least as other tumours are, say that the operation is unsuccessful, because a suf¬ ficiency of the surrounding substance has not been removed, or that it had been undertaken when the absorbents had become contaminated, and success was not to be anticipated; but if performed in proper time and manner, they assert, the result will in common be as favourable as in other af¬ fections. Cancer, too, is generally solitary, and * My friend Dr Clark has met with a case of this description. Scarpa, however, states that it “ rarely or ever happens that two really legitimate scirrhi are met with in the same individual.” Med. Chirurg. Review, voL iii. p. 176. -J- “ I know not how to account for it,” says Dr Adams, “ but where every thing has appeared to succeed, the patients have in many instances died within a year or two after the operation.” Obs. on the Cancerous Breast, p. 114. D N