This is a complete transcript of Dr. John Beard’s book, ‘The Enzyme Treatment of Cancer and Its Scientific Basis’, of which there are only 18 copies worldwide. The book is a collection of papers, which can be a little dense to read, but if you’re willing to persist, what lies within are the origins of cancer and how to treat it.

PART 1

THE PROBLEMS OF CANCER

INTRODUCTION page 1

I. EMBRYOLOGICAL ASPECTS AND ETIOLOGY OF CARCINOMA page 48

II. THE EMBRYOLOGY AND ETIOLOGY OF TUMOURS page 67

III. THE PROBLEMS OF CANCER page 95

IV. THE CANCER PROBLEM page 108

V. THE INTERLUDE OF CANCER page 122

VI. THE ASYMMETRY OF THE CYCLE OF LIFE, BEING “THE END OF THE THREAD” page 143

PART II

THE PANCREATIC OR ENZYME TREAT OF CANCER

RETROSPECT page 166

VII. GENERAL DIRECTIONS FOR THE PANCREATIC OR ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

IN ITS VARIOUS FORMS page 188

VIII. TWO RECENT CASES page 209

IX. ON THE RELATIONS OF TRYPSIN AND AMYLOPSIN page 223

X. A PUBLISHED TEST OF “THE TRYPSIN TREATMENT OF CANCER” page 230

XI. THE CRUCIAL TEST OF THE NATURE OF CANCER page 235

XII. “SCIENCE IS PREVISION” page 243

xvii

APPENDIX A : THE LIVERPOOL LECTURE—GERM-CELLS AND THE CANCER PROBLEM page 247

APPENDIX B: PICK: IN THE “DISCUSSION ZU DEN VORTRАGEN ЖBER DIE ЃTIOGIE DES CARCINOMS,”

IN “BERLINER KLIN. WORCHENSCHRIFT,” 1905, NO. 13. ABSTRACT OF THE REMARKS

CONTRIBUTED BY THE PATHOLOGIST DR. L. PICK TO THE DISCUSSION ON THE

ETIOLOGY OF CANCER, IN BERLIN, MARCH 15, 1905 page 252

APPENDIX C: THE LIFE-CYCLE OF THE HIGHER ANIMALS AND ALTERNATION OF GENERATIONS page 255

APPENDIX D: THE NAPELS CASE OF EPITHELIOMA OF THE TONGUE page 265

APPENDIX E: THE FUNCTION OF THE CORPUS LETEUM page 267

APPENDIX F: THE TREATMENT OF TUBERCULOSIS IN SANATORIA page 271

APPENDIX G: SOME OF THE SUCESSFUL CASES REPORTED IN PAST YEARS, ALL OF WHICH WERE TREATED

WITH GENUINE PREPARATIONS OF TRYPSIN AND AMYLOPSIN page 273

APPENDIX H: NEGATIVE RESULTS IN SCIENCE page 277

APPENDIX K: SCIENTIFIC PRIORITY page 279

APPENDIX L: “ENCEPHALOID” CANCER OF THE BREAST page 280

APPENDIX M: THE GERMAN PREPARATIONS page 281

INDEX page 283

xviii

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGS. FACING PAGE

I-4. ILLUSTRATING THE GERM-CELLS OF FISHES AND THEIR MIGRATIONS INTO THE EMBRYONIC

BODY page 58

5. DIAGRAM OF THE LIFE-CYCLE OF A BACK-BONED ANIMAL page 124

6. AFTER FOUR MONTHS’ TREATMENT, SHOWING NECROTIC TUMOR IN SITU. JULY 15, 1909

page 208

7. AFTER REMOVAL OF DEAD TUMOUR EN MASSE. TUMOUR LIFTED OUT WITH DISSECTING

FORCEPS WITHOUT BLEEDING OR OOZING. JULY 15, 1909 page 208

8. NO TUMOUR LEFT: PARTS HEALED AND CLEAN, SEPTEMBER 17, 1909

page 210

9. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN OCTOBER 14, 1910, FIFTEEN MONTHS AFTER THE SLOUGH ( SHOWN

IN FIG. 6) HAD BEEN LIFTED OUT OF THE CHEEK WITH FORCEPS page 210

10. PHOTOGRAPH OF THE SLIDE OF THE TUMOUR WHICH WAS PREPARED BY A PATHOLOGIST

OF THE ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL COLLEGE. THE PATIENT’S NAME, WRITTEN ON IT BY

CAPTAIN LAMBELLE, HAS BEEN ERASED page 212

11. MICRO-PHOTOGRAPH OF A PORTION OF THE SLIDE OF FIG. 10. PREPARED BY MR. A.

FLATTERS, F.R.M.S., MANCHESTER. THE MAGNIFICATION IS 360 DIAMETERS page 212

xix

THE

ENZYME TREATMENT OF CANCER

AND ITS SCIENTIFIC BASIS

INTRODUCTION

Some years ago a former fellow-student—M.D. (Lond.), Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians,

London, physician to a large hospital in London – remarked that a single case of cure of undoubted cancer

would establish the truth of the writer’s published statements, and bring the whole world to his feet. Not

long after then, here and there cures were published; but to these I will not refer; for, unlike those of the

York case, the scientific proofs of them are not in my possession, and in one way or another it may be

said of many of them, that the evidences in their favour were incomplete or inconclusive, which latter

was, indeed, the verdict pronounced, without adducing scientific evidences, upon “trypsin” by Sir Henry

Morris, Bart., late President of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, as recently as 1908. To a

profession such as the medical one, which does not yet grasp the nature of the scientific evidences, the

results of the pancreatic or enzyme treatment, even in the most favourable cases, might easily have been

taken to be “inconclusive.” The scientific facts that certain tumours had yielded to the stereo-chemical

test—the highest court of appeal—and thereby had shown their malignant

nature, were not evidences to those, who knew nothing at all of modern embryology or of stereochemistry,

and who relied implicitly upon the microscopical examination and appearances of a portion of

the growth taken before or after operation. Then there were the countless failures,* many of them due, as

I am now convinced, to faulty preparations, or to injections which were very much too weak for their

work. In this way great difficulties had to be surmounted, quite apart from what has been termed the

“conservatism” of the medical profession. Apart from the latter, these difficulties seem now to have been

removed. Definite statements can be made concerning the requirements of really efficacious preparations

for the treatment, and a successful case of cure, not standing isolated, can be, and is, produced in the

present writing.

*For the sake of the scientific truth, the published opinion of Professor F. Blumenthal, of the University of

Berlin—certainly a competent judge—regarding these should be noted. The vast majority of the cases hitherto

treated (usually with very weak injections and with small does of these) were in an advanced phase of cancer.

Oftener than not they were some of the failures of surgery. Professor Blumenthal remarks—rightly and

scientifically—that the cases as yet handed over for medical treatment, as opposed to surgical, wee nearly all such

that no possible treatment could have saved them. Lest this should be supposed to be exaggerated, Professor

Blumenthal’s actual words may be cited. He writes: “Die innere Behandlung des Carcinoms ist heute lediglich

beschrКnkt auf die verzweifelten, nicht operablen FКlle. Wir haven jetzt daran festzhalten, dass jede bЪsartige

Geschwulst, so lange sie operabel ist, auch durch Operation entfernt werden muss. Es handelt sich also für die

innere Behandlung um eine Kategorie von KrankheitsfКllen, welche vergleichbar sind mit verallgemeinerter

Tuberculose, disseminierter Eiterung. Man stellt an die innere Therapie die Anforderung, nicht die beginnenden

FКlle zu heilen, sondern überl.sst ihr fast nur solche FКlle, die wohl niemals gerettet werden kЪnnten, auch wenn es

eiene innere Methode gКbe.” Ferdinand Blumenthal, “innere Behandlung und Fürsorge bei Krebskranken,” in

Zeitschrift f. Krebs forschung, vol. X., pp. 134-148 (1910); loc. Cit., p. 134.

In the eighth section of “The Belfast Address” the physicist, Professor John Tyndall, wrote: “But

there is in the true man of science a desire stronger than the wish to have his beliefs upheld—namely, the

desire to have them true. And this stronger wish causes him to reject the most plausible support if he has

reason to suspect that it is vitiated by error.” That is the writer’s position to-day. Six years ago he stated

publicly that, in the secretion of that important digestive gland, the pancreas, Nature had furnished a

potent means of coping with cancer. Even though there had been no other successes at the hands of

Captain Lambelle, R.A.M.C. or of other, the successful issue of the case of the York ex-drummer,

described in Chapter VIII., demonstrates for all time the scientific truth of the foregoing conclusion. The

army surgeon who treated the patient, and the writer of these lines, both invite the fullest investigation of

this case. The tumour was recurrent immediately after two operations upon it, and it had become

inoperable. The diagnosis was confirmed by microscopical examination of a portion of the tumour-mass

removed at the second operation by a pathologist of the Royal Army Medical College. A section which

he made is in the writer’s possession, and from an examination of it he is able to say that the diagnosis

given is not open to the slightest question. The patient is alive and well, free from recurrence, and his

address is written across the copy of the ten charts of the case, all certified and signed by the surgeon, and

which, like the photographic negatives, copies of the official documents, and all other particulars, I owe to

my friend, Captain F. W. Lambelle, M. D., R.A. M.C., now stationed in Central India. All the evidences

are open to the most searching investigation, and this in the interest of scientific truth as well as in those

of humanity, is invited.

A surgeon, who published as a “scientific report” an account of the failure of the enzyme

treatment at his hands in a large series of (mostly very advanced) cases, remarked to the writer not long

ago that a single case of success would not prove his thesis. The exact opposite of this assertion has been

maintained quite recently by the Moseley Professor Surgery in Harvard University, Boston, Dr. Maurice

H. Richardson. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, February 4, 1911, in an article upon

“The Operative Treatment of Cancer of the Breast” (p. 315), he write: “And yet I am full of enthusiasm in

the hope that the near future or the next method will solve the problem. One single total disappearance of

undoubted breast cancer under any form of non-operative treatment will presage success, just as surely as

a successful man-flight presaged aviation.” A little further on he adds: “One varies, perhaps, in the

positiveness of one’s opinion. One’s diagnosis may be an absolute conviction. I have often said—and I

here repeat—that the diagnosis of cancer by gross appearance, plus the history, made by an experienced

man is more worthy of credence in some cases than the microscopic examination alone.” Everything of

import here named by Professor Richardson has been fulfilled to the letter. In 1908 Captain Lambelle

gave the enzyme treatment, as laid down by him further on in this book, in a case of “encephaloid”*

cancer of the breast The patient was a Yorkshire lady of social position. The diagnosis was made by

“experienced men,” as well as by Lambelle himself. There was no operation and no microscopical

examination. In his last letter to me, dated December 1,

*”Encephaloid cancer,” a term used by pathologists to define soft cancer from hard cancer, or scirrhus.

Encephaloid cancer is so termed because of its brain-like softness. It is described as quick-growing and rapidly fatal

(see Appendix L).

1910, he writes concerning this case: “By the way, that case of encephaloid breast cancer is alive and free

from recurrence—diagnosed October, 1908. I saw her on November 29, as near as mortal man can say

‘cured.’” Further comment on the above is not needed.

I was well aware, as any scientific man is, that negative results in scientific experiments never

proved anything at all in science, but was also under the impression that very many scientific discoveries

of great moment had been the outcome of single successful experiments. The fall of an apple from a tree

revealed the law of universal gravitation to Newton. In our own day a single photographic impression of

some keys, etc., led the physicist RЪntgen, in 1895, to the discovery of the RЪntgen, or X rays; and,

strange to say, the find of a few stray ganglion cells in the development of an American lake-fish in 1888

led the writer ultimately to the discovery of the nature of cancer, and of much besides. The scientific

investigator knows, even if some surgeons be ignorant of it, that very many discoveries in science are the

outcome of what at first were of the nature of single successful experiments. Even the cures* of cancer

*Looking at the matter from the point of view of practical embryology, the so-called “cures” of cancer by

surgical operation are probably in all cases without exception examples of the “cure” of a benign tumour, a more or

less reduced “embryoma.” Naturally benign tumours are of common occurrence, and whether diagnosed by

microscopical examination or only clinically , the diagnosis of cancer is not one which can be regarded as

conforming to a scientific criterion. When one thinks of the extraordinary frequency of recurrence after surgical

operation, one can only conclude that, in the absence of the crucial stereo-chemical tests, either of adequate

injections of sufficiently potent preparations of trypsin and amylopsin, or of examination of the tumour albumins by

means of the polarimeter, at present there is no valid evidence extant that operation has ever cured a single case of

malignant disease, though it may quite well have induced it, as the X rays have often done. Sir James Paget. A

scientific

surgical operation are not in blocks of certain dimension; but assuming that surgery ever does cure even a

single case of cancer—a very big assumption which, as a scientific man, I make only for the sake of

argument—each case of cure would be of the nature of a single successful experiment. I do not for a

moment deny that surgery does, and has done, many very wonderful thing, but to assert that it ever

knowingly cures a single case of cancer is a scientific absurdity.

If ten, a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand cases of cure be required—by the surgeons, not by

science—to establish truth of the scientific foundations of the pancreatic or enzyme treatment of cancer,

then from the particulars furnished in later chapters of this book, any of these numbers can be obtained,

always provided, as the lawyers say, that properly and scientifically standardized and guaranteed

preparations be employed and the treatment be carried out in the scientific fashion—letter and spirit—laid

down here by Captain Lambelle and the writer. Since the medical profession of Great Britain has,

through some of its members, been most careful to guard that the writer, who is a mere scientific man,

and “not even a medical practitioner,” should treat no cases at all—cancer being a natural phenomenon,

not “an incurable disease”—more than this single demonstration cannot be asked from me. There is, sad

enough to say, no dearth of cases, for in England and Wales alone annually nearly 40,000 people, some of

them surgeons, die from malignant disease.

(continued from page 5 footnotes)

man of high standing because of the extent and nature of his investigations, doubted whether operation was ever

advisable in case of cancer, and on the evening of my Liverpool lecture of 1905, I heard a prominent surgeon

declare that he would not be willing, even in the most favourable case of cancer in which he had operated, to stake a

sovereign against its recurrence.

It behooves me to add a few words of explanation of Captain Lambelle’s connection with the

work. In his address, “Science and Immortality” (London, 1904), Sir William Osler, in the finest written

compliment any of my researches had ever received, described (p.58) “the patiently worked-out story of

the morphological continuity of the germ-plasm” (i.e., the germ-cells) as “one of the fairy-tales of

science.” Shortly after then their author was to have an unexpected and much greater compliment,

because of a practical kind, paid to these investigations. As a scientific man the writer places his trust, in

true military fashion, in “divisions” and “brigades,” represented by the published records of observation

and experiment, and not in “fairy-tales of science.” The investigation, one of the most powerful of my

“divisions,” which immediately preceded the cancer work was into the history of the germ-cells, the

forerunners of eggs and sperms, from generation to generation. Some of the published results of these

researches found their way as far as China, where, in Hong-Kong, a Captain of the British Royal Army

Medical Corps happened to be stationed. These finds interested him so much that he endeavoured, on

human embryos, to make independent observations.

In the first instance these failed, as any experienced practical embryologist would have foretold.

This officer, Captain F. W. Lambelle, M.D., was shortly afterwards ordered home again, and, on reporting

himself to the Director-General at the War Office, he related the foregoing facts and his deep interest in

my scientific researches. This led the Director-General to station Captain Lambelle with the 2nd Light

Dragoons (The Royal Scots Greys), at that time in garrison in Edinburgh, so that he might learn more of

my work. From the day when, un-

announced, Captain Lambelle entered my little room in full uniform, and saluting, introduced himself, we

have been close friends. He worked for himself over much my material—a collection also, like the Scots

Greys, “Second to None!”—and he read all my published papers, which, unlike some scientific people, he

thoroughly understood and appreciated; in fact, he evinced the deepest interest in all the problems and

their solutions which had occupied my leisure hours during many years. At that time I happened to be,

noiens velens, in the thick on the cancer-business, and he often expressed his regrets that the nature of his

work, with young healthy soldiers, gave him no chances of looking into cancer-matters practically for

himself. Subsequently, his appointment as operating surgeon of the Military Hospital, York—the hospital

of the Northern Command—placed, one after the other, four cases of cancer in his way, and of these he

cured three, the fourth dying from hЊmorrhage as the treated dead sloughing tumour came away. One of

these cases fully recorded in this book. The other two successful cases are not laid stress upon by him,

simply because, although the clinical diagnoses of cancer were ample, the microscopical evidences, upon

which scientifically I personally lay no stres at all, were lacking.* In order to say the surgeons who have

set up this arbitrary stand of the microscopical appearances of cancer as a criterior—often a very

deceptive one—the requisite slides of sections of the tumour have to be produced as completing the

surgical diagnosis.

In his last letter to me before sailing to India, Captain Lambelle stated that the total number of

injections given in latest case was 120. Apparently, from the charts, the ferments exhibited March to

July, 1909, did not

*Compare Professor Richardson’s opinion as cited on p. 4.

amount to more than 60,000 tryptic units and 120,000 amylolytic ones. That is to say, for his last

published case the strengths and doses of injections employed during the vital period of the treatment can

be stated. This can be said also only of the report of Messrs. Ball and Thomas. Dr. Bainbridge, according

to his own statement, used injections of five strengths of trypsin, but in his report he does not discriminate

among these, or give figures, from which even approximate calculations, or any at all; can be made. All

of those in this country, or elsewhere, who, publicly or privately, have condemned the treatment, with the

single exception mentioned above, whatever its scientific value, have furnished no particulars of strengths

or doses and of the total number of injections exhibited; in fact, not one of them has given a scientific

verdict, for not one of them has produced any evidences that he ever employed any ferments whatever. In

1906 and 1907 the statement was often made by several very prominent London surgeons to private

patients that they had “tried” trypsin in cancer, but had found it “useless.” They themselvew knew

nothing at all about the preparations used, but actually this adverse verdict was given after the

employment of preparations containing at that time less than 10 tryptic units per cubic centimetre or

ampoule.* This should be

*The first injections of “trypsin” employed in 1906 were all, or nearly all, made up from Fairchild Brothers

and Foster’s “trypsin in powder.” This, which is no longer on sale anywhere, was a very potent preparation, and it

had been on the market for many years. At the beginning of April, 1906, the manufacturers of this “trypsin in

powder,” as they announced by advertisements in the chief British medical and chemical newspapers, withdrew it

from sale. Tis step placed others makers of “trypsin injections” upon their own resources, or very largely so. There

was already a “famine in the land” as regards “trypsin,” so much of one that I heard through friends of several

cancer patients who were being treated with raw sweetbreads,

compared with Captain Lambelle’s usual dose of one thousand (1,000) tryptic units plus two thousand

(2,000) amylolytic units, 1 ampoule or 1 c.c. of each.

A University Professor of Surgery, in support of his public statement of 1910, that the pancreatic

ferments were “futile” in cancer, recently sent me copies of Bainbridge’s report, and an author’s copy of a

paper by Sir Henry Morris, read before the Surgical Congress, Brussels, September 21 to 25, 1908. In the

latter it is written: “He noted the reports on the use of the latter “’trypsin’), and the fact that the evidences

in its favour could not be considered conclusive.” Trypsin alone, a most deadly remedy for cancer if

employed without abundant amylopsin, is mentioned. Nothing whatever is said about the conclusive or

non-conclusive character of the failing evidences, that adequate strengths and doses of trypsin, and any at

all of amylopsin, had been employed. No doubt the preparations wee said to be “potent.” Possibly to-day

Sir Henry Morris could no more produce any scientific evidences concerning the strengths and

compositions of the injections he was referring to in 1908 than the University Professor, mentioned

above, did do or could do when I asked him politely for some particulars as scientific evidences of the

truth of his published statement. It ought not to be necessary, but—leider!–it is, to remind surgeons that

in science it is a rule—as it also is in courts of justice—that no

(continued from page 9 footnotes)

or pancreas glands. I have always considered the withdrawal of this “trypsin in powder” as a very wise step, but one

of its direct consequences would appear to have been the extensive employment, especially in and about London, of

a “trypsin” injection possession at that time rather less than ten units of tryptic strength. The eminent surgeons

mentioned above had not, as a matter of fact, a ghost of an idea of the potencies of the injections they so glibly

condemned—the boxes of ampoules were labelled with the magic word “trypsin.”

assertion shall be made without at the same time the production of the evidences for it.

Of course, “trypsin” is not a cure for cancer, a fact stated by the writer in Nature four years ago.

The evidences for this, it may be added, are forthcoming in abundance whenever asked for. What has

destroyed cancer without injury to the patient in cases not too far advanced, and what will do the like

again and again, is the use of properly prepared injections of trypsin of a strength of at least a thousand

Roberts tryptic units of activity plus equal amounts of amylopsin of two thousand to two thousand four

hundred (2,000 to 2,400) Roberts amylolytic units of strength per cubic centimetre, and the doses of

injections and their frequency must be adapted to the needs of the particular case under treatment.

As “failure is easier of attainment than success in anything,” it would be possible to the end of

time for some surgeon, or official cancer researcher, to declare that trypsin and amylopsin were “useless,”

or “futile,” in the particular cases treated by him, and used as he employed them. Scientifically, all such

verdicts are worthless, unless the evidences for them be produced in full; and these must include the

previous history of the case, the duration of the treatment, the preparations used, definite statements as to

their purity, all necessary details as to their quantitative values, their doses, and the number of these.

Science, as a mistress, makes exacting demands upon the observer, and the mere designation of a

document as a “scientific report” does not alone confer any scientific value upon its contents.

The view generally accepted by mankind, even by all medical men, has long been that cancer is

“an incurable disease.” How often have I not heard this expression, even from very prominent surgeons!

Not only was

cancer incurable, but it was a disease of the nature and origin of which the whole of the medical

profession, by its own confession, often proclaimed by leading surgeons in public orations, knew nothing

at all about. Under such circumstances it could hardly be strange that it should not be in conformity with

the generally accepted, when a scientific man, who knew very well what he was speaking about, and who,

like Pasteur, had earned the right to an opinion by his investigations of many long year, announced that

cancer was not a disease, but a natural phenomenon, that it was germinal in origin and asexual

(trophoblastic) in nature. This was all something new, which had never been said before by anyone,

living or dead. As at the present time we were supposed, but possibly erroneously, to have outlived the

Dark Ages, and as, at all events, those who made me, the scientific Germans, who have advanced far

beyond the Dark Ages, had long advocated and practised “the freedom of science in the modern state,” it

was something to be examined scientifically. It is interesting to see how this was realized in Germany.

A recent part of the German Journal of Cancer Investigation (vol. x., part 1) contains the report

of a special Cancer Congress, held in May, 1910. Here Professor C. Neuber, well known for his

researches into the chemistry of cancer, writes on p. 70 regarding the position of chemistry in cancer

research in words which recall Duclaux’s declaration concerning chemistry and medicine. Neuberg

affirms that where the problems of the nature of tumours are in question, chemistry will never retreat from

the field of conflict. Duclaux said: “With Pasteur chemistry took possession of medicine. It is easy to

foresee that she will never loosen her hold upon it.”” As a study of

the following pages will show, my fundamental discoveries of the nature of cancer, and of the places of

the two all-powerful ferments, trypsin and amylopsin, in the treatment of this natural phenomenon, not

disease, were founded in the first instance in the science of embryology. This is as true for the separate

reasons advanced for the employment of trypsin and of amylopsin as it is for those urged in 1902 as

demonstrating the asexual (trophoblastic) nature of cancer.* Afterwards, from 1906, the chemical

evidences—the stereo-chemical ones—began to reveal themselves to the observer, who was not like that

genius Pasteur, “a mere chemist,” but a practical embryologist, who had chanced to have some sort of

elementary chemical education at the hands of Sir Henry Roscoe and of that pioneer of comparative

physiological chemistry, the late Professor C. F. W.

*Sexual and Asexual, Sexual Generation and Asexual Generation.—In animals and in plants two modes of

reproduction are recognized, the sexual one, by means of germ-cells, eggs, and sperms, and the asexual by budding,

which is really a process of continuous indefinite cell-division, with no eggs or sperms. In an animal or plant a

sexual generation is one which bears reproductive organs, in which eggs or sperms, or both, arise. On the other

hand, an asexual generation of an animal or plant is one which never bears reproductive organs, eggs or sperms, or

both, but which reproduces in the way indicated above, really by cell-division. In plants the asexual generation is

the flowering plant, which is capable of indefinite unrestricted increase, as, for example, a Gloire de Dijon rose or

the fine white chrysanthemum, Niveus. Origianlly there was but one plant of each of these. The sexual generation

of a flowering plant is a small microscopic entity contained with the flower. In animals all the individuals which

bear sexual organs belong to the sexual generation, which the asexual generation are represented in various ways.

Thus, in the sea-ploypes, by the colony of polypes, while here the medusЊ or “jelly-fish” are sexual; in worms,

starfish, etc., but what are known as larvЊ, while here the wor, starfish, etc., are sexual; and lastly, in the highest

animals or mammals the asexual generation is present only during uterine life, as what Hubrecht termed the

trophoblast. This latter used to be regarded as one of the “foetal membranes” under the name of chorion.

Krukenberg. Thus it came about that, while the line of first advance was purely embryological, later a

junction could be effected with the science of stereo-chemistry, and a further base for operations obtained

in the fundamental discoveries of Pasteur on the asymmetry of naturally occurring organic compounds.

The following remarks* (literally translated), by Professor F. Blumenthal, of Berlin, concerning

“trypsin” and cancer are of interest: “For a long time the trypsin-therapy of Beard awakened greater hope.

This depends upon the quick digestion of the cancerous tumour by trypsin. If trypsin or pancreatin be

injected into a cancer, one notes a fairly quick softening of the same, leading to a liquefaction, which is

aseptic, not made up of pus. In some cases it appears that in small and readily accessible tumours it has

been possible with the help of trypsin to cause the tumour to disappear. I will recall only the case in the

aural clinic of Munich. In larger tumours, especially with metastates, I have only had failures. Successes

also seem to be lacking in mouse-tumours, as Bashford reported. † In the treatment with

* Blumenthal, F., “Innere Behandlung und Fürsorge bei Krebskranken,” in Zeitschr. F. Krebsforschung,

1910, vol. X., pp. 137-138.

† It would appear not to have occurred to Professor Blumenthal that this statement might have reference to

inert ferments. Since the experiments, which must be supposed to have led to this erroneous conclusion, have never

yet been published, and since they are, indeed, not mentioned in a single word in the Third Scientific Report of the

Imperial Cancer Research Fund, published in 1908, and, lastly, since there are no scientific or other evidences extant

to show that ferments of any kind or sort had ever been employed in these unpublished experiments, I feel bound to

ask Professor Blumenthal to explain, as a scientific man, why he cites these unpublished experiments, and nonexistent

evidences? It is common enough to note in scientific publications that published experiments or evidences

have been ignored by the author, but it is something quite new to find unpublished experiments and mythical

evidences cited in a

trypsin I have also noticed a disagreeable complication, which consists in this, that often the digestive

power of the trypsin passed over also to sound tissue, and a disagreeable destruction of this came to pass.

Recently Sticker and Falk have improved the trypsin-therapy in that they have united the action to trypsin

to charcoal, by which means, after a single injection, this action persists much longer, since this

carbenzyme is not so quickly used up as ordinary trypsin.”

Regarding the foregoing, only a few words need be added. It will be noted that Blumenthal also

confirms the “liquefying” action of trypsin on cancer. This has now happened in London, Berlin, New

York, and elsewhere. The researcher of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund denied some years ago that

trypsin had any action at all upon cancer-cells. Looked at scientifically, either trypsin acts upon living

cancer-cells, and

(continued from page 14 footnotes)

scientific paper. Moreover, as Professor Blumenthal is quite aware, the results of his own experiments with

“tryspin” are in direct contradiction with the verdict pronounced, without the production of any evidences, by

officials of this cancer research. It reminds one of the reception accorded to von Siebold’s discovery of two sorts of

spermatozoa in a fresh-water dioecious snail, Paludina vivipara, in 1836. Within an easy walk of Würzburg, this

snail is readily found in great numbers, and the first time that these two sorts of sperms were seen by me was in

1882, in living material obtained not far from Würzburg. None the less, when von Siebold published his find, the

professor of Anatomy in the University of Würzburg, the celebrated anatomist and embryologist, Alber von

KЪlliker, interposed the weight of his authority, and, without taking the trouble to examine the facts for himself in

the animal concerned, disposed of von Siebold’s finds…simply by denying the correctness of his observations.

Since that time an extensive literature has sprung up concerning twofold sperms in Paludina and many other

animals, including man, and the well-known cytologist, F. Meves, has published a minute account of the

development and histology of these two sperms of this snail, the wormlike and the hairlike forms.

ultimately, if used in solutions of sufficient strength, liquefies them, as maintained by myself,

Blumenthal, and—“in some cases”—by Bainbridge, or it has no action upon them, as stated in 1906, and

again in 1907 by official researchers. One or other of these statements must be false. The official

assertion was unsupported by the production of any evidences whatever, the former rests upon the

independent testimony of four* different observers, situated as widely apart as London, Edinburgh,

Berlin, and New York. The official statement is untrue. Already, in Nature (January 10,1907), I called

upon the executive of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund to substantiate the assertions made under their

auspices, or to withdraw them. I now repeat this unsatisfied demand, merely adding that, if they wish

their finds still to stand, they must complete the statements scientifically by the addition that inert trypsin†

had been employed, and that the assertions challenged related to such inert trypsin, and not to trypsin in

an active form.

In the later pages of this book I have explained why it comes about that in some cases trypsin

may act upon

* As I recognize, while finally reading through this manuscript before sending it to press, a fifth observer

of the formation of “liquid cancer” can be cited. From the charts of Captain Lambelle’s case of sarcoma, and from

his description on a subsequent page of the course of his case of lympho-sarcoma, it is clear that in what he speaks

of as “sero-purulent fluid” in the one case, and “purulent fluid” in the other, he was really dealing with liquefied

cancer.

† The General Superintendent of this cancer research himself writes as follows: “It is surprising how many

people are unconvinced that the scientific examination of such claims presupposes exact knowledge of the

ingredients of the remedy. In the absence of this knowledge, negative conclusions could always be ascribed to

error” (British Medical Journal, May, 27, 1911, p. 1221). One wonders whether he knew this when the unpublished

experiments with “trypsin” were carried out, if so, why he failed to act upon it.

“normal” somatic tissues. It is in very advanced cancer cases, where the tissues have been much acted

upon by the ferments and toxic products of cancer, and have thereby been injured. In this connection the

finds of Yoshimoto and Neuberg concerning the auto-digestion of cancerous liver, and of portions

bordering upon the cancer, are of much import.

As to the improvements in the treatment brought about by Sticker and Falk, I content myself with

the record of them, and make no comment beyond saying that, in my opinion, no “trypsin-therapy” which

is unaccompanied by abundant animal amylopsin will be, or can be, satisfactory in the long run.

In the long, interesting article, summing up what he considers to be our present knowledge of the

chemistry of cancer, published in the “Ergebnisse der Physiologie” (1910), Professor F. Blumenthal, of

Berlin, has a reference to “trypsin” in cancer. Recalling his own investigations with Wolff, published in

1905 (Med. Klinik, No. 5), he states that (in the test-tube!) all the tumours, five in number, wee very

easily attacked and pulled down by trypsin, and in a footnote he adds: “These finds were the basis of the

trypsin-therapy of cancer.” In a more recent publication (German Journal of Cancer Investigation, vol.

X., p. 137), he makes a similar statement in these words: “For a long time the trypsin-therapy of Beard

awakened greater hope. This depends upon the fact that the cancerous tumour is quickly digessted by

trypsin” (in the test-tube!). On the other hand, the writer of the brief article upon cancer in the new

eleventh edition* of the “EnclopЊdia Britannica” assigns as

*The prospectus states that “this new edition represents the results of a fresh survey, undertaken

in every department of knowledge by the most eminent authorities, up to the year 1910.”

the reason of my advocacy of trypsin in cancer that the pancreas-gland was believed to be a t fault in

cancer patients. Versions of the reasons similar to these two have been given in other places—thus, in the

Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift. They are both quite incorrect. My only connection with the

first was in publishing in the Lancet of April 29, 1905, a summary and translation of some recent German

cancer work, including that of Blumenthal and Wolff upon the chemistry of cancer, and the citation of

this relation of trypsin to the cancer-cell as a certain support of my views. As to the second reason,

neither the writer of the article in the “EnclopЊdia Britannica” nor anyone else can find in any of my

published writings even a hint of this statement. Moreover, it has been supposed that my affirmation of

the germinal origin of cancer meant that it was embryonic or somatic, and my name has been quoted as

that of a supporter and advocate of “embryonic theories,” such as the Remak-Cohnheim one of

“embryonic rests.” In the first article referred to (“Ergebnisse der Physiologie”) Blumenthal considers

these embryonic theories as refuted from the chemical side by the chemical fact mentioned in his paper,

such as the discovery by Abderhalden and Pincussohn that the ferments contained in extracts of mousetumours

pull down silk peptones and polypetids atypically. With this conclusion I agree absolutely, and

would add that ever since 1902, and before then, I have been an opponent of the Remak-Cohnheim theory

of “embryonic rests” upon grounds of embryological observation, leading to the conclusion that these

“rests” are mere figments of the imagination. The Remak-Cohnheim theory of embryonic rests is,

therefore, now untenable on decisive chemical and embryological grounds, and must be abandoned.

My theories of cancer, its origin and nature, differ toto coelo from those advanced by any other

observer, living or dead. The theory of the germinal origin of cancer, which says that a cancer arises

primarily from a latent germ-cell, does not mean that cancer is embryonic in origin or character. Germcells,

such as fertilized eggs, give rise to something else than embryo or soma: they produce on occasion

trophoblast (asexual generation). I know that some embryologist, for whom chemistry and physiology

have no existence in their researches, describe the trophoblast of Hubrecht as merely another name for

what they term “extra-embryonic epiblast.” To use the latter term does not signify anything more than

where in normal development the supposed portion of epiblast lies—i.e., beyond the embryo. I do not

agree with them that trophoblast is epiblastic (embryonic skin) in character, or that their description of it

as “extra-embryonic epiblast” in any way defines it embryologically. Their account is merely descriptive,

and it gives no information whatever concerning the chemical, physical, or physiological characters of

this “extra-embryonic epiblast” or trophoblast, which, quite unlike ordinary epiblast or embryonic skin,

eats and erodes the maternal tissues.

In very simple words I will now endeavour to summarize what is meant by the germinal origin

and the asexual or trophoblastic nature of cancer. To these shall be added brief accounts of the reasons

advanced six years ago for employing “the secretion of that important digestive gland, the pancreas,”

including the two ferments, trypsin and amylopsin, in the scientific treatment of cancer. It is appropriate

that this should be written down on January 20, 1911, the sixth anniversary of the scientific lecture in

Liverpool, in which the more important of these reasons were first announced publicly.

One of the most remarkable of the many brilliant things done by the illustrious French chemist,

Louis Pasteur, was the giving of two public scientific lectures, in 1860, “On the Asymmetry of Naturally

Occurring Organic Compounds,” which include the albumins, sugars, starches, etc., found or formed in

animals or plants. In a scientific instrument, known as a polarimeter, these compounds always rotate the

plane of polarized light to the right or to the left. Therefore, by chemists they are described briefly as

dextro- or lЊvo- (d- or l-) compounds—for example, dextrose, or d-sugar, and lЊvulose or 1-sugar. That

is, as they occur in living nature, animals or plants, they are never “compensated mixtures” of both stereoisomers—

never, for instance, of dextrose, and lЊvulose—and in such “compensated mixtures” all rotation

is absent, because the one compound twists the plane of polarized light as much to the right as the other

does to the left. When the chemist is able to manufacture any of these compounds in the laboratory, he

has never been able to make the one compound, the 1- one, without an equal amount of the other, the done.

To get them separated he has had to employ expedients, such as fermentation by yeast, etc., when

one of the two might be attacked and pulled down, but not the other. The fact that all living organisms,

whether animal or plant, manufacture or contain invariably only the one stereo-isomer, and not the other,

has often been commented upon. Thus, by Professor W. J. Pope, who writes that while d-glucose (dsugar)

is a valuable foodstuff, we should be unable to digest its opposite or anithesis, 1-glucose, although

they have the same chemical composition—that is, are isomers or stereo-isomers. Humanity is, therefore,

according to him, composed of dextro-men and dextro-women; and, putting his words, which will

be found in Chapter VI., in simpler language, just as we ourselves should probably starve if provided with

food of organic compounds the opposites in light-rotation of those to which we are accustomed, so our

opposites, the lЊvo-men, if they were to come among us now, when we have not yet succeeded in

manufacturing the more important foodstuffs artificially, would find our food, even our bodies, not

suitable for their nourishment. That is, these foodstuffs would require to be changed, or “inverted.” If we

our-selves had to digest compensated mixtures, we should need a double digestive apparatus. He

supposes that in course of time the one set of compounds as articles of food has vanished. If it were

scientifically true, as well as “generally accepted,” that the fertilized egg gave rise directly to an embryo

or individual, then one of the sets would have vanished from the nutrition of all higher animals. Now,

one of my discoveries has been that Pope’s hypothetical lЊvo-men do exist, and that they are represented

by, among other things, the cancers. In this way the second set of nutritive compounds has not vanished,

but at its basis the antithesis of two sets of things—compounds of carbon, defined by Pasteur—is the

same antithesis as that of two sets of living things, asexual and sexual respectively, discovered and in the

researches of more than twenty years described by me as occurring in the cycle of life of a fish, a frog, or

a man, etc.

The fertilized egg, and any of the (primary) germ-cells which arise later on, possess the intrinsic

property (potentiality) of developing in the one direction or the other; in the asexual, with the cleavage of

the fertilized egg, when trophoblast first raises, as in every normal development; in the sexual, when a

primary germ-cell, which itself is

derived ultimately from the fertilized egg, unfolds as an embryo or individual. What I found was that

Nature employed this peculiarity of the antithetic or opposite character of certain naturally occurring

compounds, all containing carbon, and many of them also nitrogen, as the chemical basis of the cycle of

animal life. She did not attempt to unite both sets of the compounds, the 1- ones and the d- ones, in any

one form, animal or plant; neither did she dispense with one of the sets. Had she done either of these

things, had she been able to do it, she would have carried out the “generally accepted” view of direct

development, egg leading directly to embryo. Then the egg would produce the hen, and the hen the egg,

and so on ad infinitum. On the contrary, in order to get back to the fertilized egg again, Nature had found

it necessary to separate the “compensated mixtures” into their components, to use at one time the one set,

made up of certain 1- and other d- compounds, and then to use the other set, made up of the opposite

ones; that is, she swings the pendulum of life first in the one direction, and then in the other, and in this

way brings it back again to the starting-point—the fertilized egg.

As pointed out in Chapter VI., in connection with the account of Professor Pope’s lecture, by

means of two generations, asexual and sexual, which alternate in the life-cycle from egg to egg. Nature

not only utilizes two of the apparent possibilities afforded by the existence of stereo-isomeric compounds,

but also she is thereby enabled to bring round again and again the cycle of life to its starting-point. Under

the orthodox and “generally accepted” view of direct development these things have not been explained,

but they have simply been ignored. The like orthodox views have also, notoriously, been

impotent to elucidate cancer, and the reasons for this failure lie on the surface.

Normally, in development, the fertilized egg, by forming trophoblast (asexual generation), swings

the pendulum in the direction of dextro-albumins, lЊvo-starches, and 1- sugars, etc., and later the primary

germ-cell, by unfolding as a sexual individual or embryo (sexual generation), in which new eggs or

sperms arise, reverses the swing of the pendulum in the direction of the formation of lЊvo-albumins,

dextro-sugars, d-starches, etc. Abnormally, some primary germ-cell, originally destined to give rise to a

twin identical with the individual harbouring it, either, ab origine, does this by producing a monstrosity,

or a benign tumour—an “embryoma”—or, remaining latent, anon it swings the pendulum in the opposite

direction, and produces a cancer, which is trophoblastic (asexual) in nature—that is, is the same product

as would arise normally from a fertilized egg. A cancer thus is not somatic, not embryonic, not

“gametoid tissue” (Farmer, Moore, and Walker), not derived from an “embryonic rest” (Remak-

Cohnheim), but it is trophoblast (asexual generation), the very antithesis or opposite of embryo or soma

(sexual generation), embryologically and chemically.

When Professor Pope spoke of dextro men and women, he would, in my opinion, have done

better to have used the terms “lЊvo-men” and “lЊvo-women.” For while the sugars and starches of our

foodstuffs are d-compounds, the nitrogenous or albuminous constituents are 1-compounds. This leads

one also to point out to the non-chemical reader that the one generation—say the sexual one, man—does

not use exclusively compounds of one rotation, 1- or d-ones, but these stereo-isomeric compounds form

series, some of them being 1-compounds,

others d-compounds. The like is true of the ferments, which certain of the albumins give rise to as

modifications of themselves. Trypsin is like the albumin from which it is derived lЊvo-rotatory; it

converts d-starches into d-sugars, among other things, but not 1-ones, and thus not the 1-glycogen or

animal starch of cancer. It acts upon and pulls down certain d-compounds of cancer. On the other hand,

the proteolytic or albumin-attacking ferment of cancer is a dextro-rotatory body, like the (dextro-rotatory)

of cancer, from which it is derived. It attacks and pulls down, not the living dextro-totatory albumins of

cancer, but the living lЊvo-rotatory albumins of the human body.

The conception I have formed of one action of amylopsin in the enzyme treatment of cancer is

briefly as follows: Acting upon the living d-albumins of cancer, trypsin pulls them down in the chemical

scale a certain distance, but not into simple harmless products. On the contrary, some of the products of

its action are very poisonous, and to all appearance these are dextro-rotatory, like cancer albumin. As

compounds of this rotation they can be acted upon and reduced to simple harmless compounds by the

ferment amylopsin, owing to its configuration, its lЊvo-rotatory character. †

* For an opportunity of determining these facts concerning the rotations of trypsin and amylopsin I am

indebted to Mr. P. W. Squire, London. At my request he kindly sent me freshly prepared and strong solutions of

both trypsin and amylopsin, as well as a bottle of the “menstruum” in which they were dissolved. In my polarimeter

the latter showed no rotation at all, while both tyrpsin and amylopsin were strong lЊvo-rotatory.

It was not my purpose to calculate their “specific rotations.”

† The following natural question was recently put to the writer by a surgeon keenly interested in these

matters: “If

The first and only reasons advanced by me publicly at Liverpool, now six years ago to the day,

for the use of pancreatic ferments in cancer, were that at a certain period of development every normal

embryo, or soma, or sexual individual, commenced to suppress the trophoblast or asexual generation of

normal development. This came to pass by the initiation of the functioning of the sweetbread or

pancreas-gland, with its powerful ferments, the two chief of which are trypsin and amylopsin.

Some imaginary relation of diabetes to cancer, or some suspected failure or “fault” on the part of

the sweetbread or pancreas gland, had nothing at all to do with the reason—as little as had the discovery a

little later on, by Blumenthal and Wolff, that trypsin easily digests

(continued from page 24 footnotes)

trypsin acts upon dextro-albumins, of what use is it in the ordinary adult body, seeing that the albumins of human

food are lЊvo-albumins?” No more than Nature does would I separate amylopsin in its action from trypsin, for, like

Nature, we must associate the two ferments. Trypsin and amylopsin, acting upon the dead lЊvo-albumins of our

food-stuffs: Trypsin only pulls these down to a limited extent, converting them into substances capable of

absorption, and on these amylopsin has no action. These are built up again into living lЊvo-albumins by cell

ferments in the body-cells. Trypsin and amylopsin acting upon the living dextro-rotatory albumins of asexual

generation or cancer: Trypsin at once attacks these, and pulls them down into quite other bodies than those which its

forms from dead lЊvo-albumins. These bodies, or some of them, are rank poisons to the human body, but, as they

are further acted upon amylopsin, and by it pulled down into simple, harmless products, the two ferments, trypsin

and amylopsin, acting here together, pull down the cancer-albumins, these products of the action of trypsin are

chemically relatively highly organized and can be used as food by the cells of the body. This not the case with the

products, to which the action of trypsin and amylopsin on cancer-albumins, living or dead, gives rise. He who

doubts the truth of the above had better, before publishing his doubts, study the recent work of Professor

Abderhalden and his pupils.

cancer cells (in the test-tube). Nor have I ever held, as some have done, that because they supposed,

erroneously, that trypsin had some action in “splitting up” glycogen or animal starch, that it “dissolved”

glycogen, therefore it should be used in cancer cases. From the start I wished all the ferments—trypsin,

amylopsin, and steapsin—of the pancreas gland to be used in the injections employed.* The import of

trypsin was, of course, clear, for it was known, since the work of Corvisart and Kühne, to attack and pull

down dead 1-albumins, and I anticipated—rightly, in spite of all the contradictions extant, which are

false—that it would, and scientifically regarded must, pull down the living d-albumins of cancer or

trophoblast. † The special reasons for the employment of very potent injections of amylopsin, which

normally converts starch into a d-sugar, termed “glucose,” came later on. It was found that the injections

first used, which were very deficient in amylopsin, being sometimes, indeed, almost chemically pure

trypsin, produced after some six to eight weeks, according to the strengths employed, very bad symptoms.

These were first reported to me by French and Italian physicians, and I told them that, as this treatment

followed the lines of what happened in a normal human gestation from the seventh week onwards, they

* For evidence of this, reference need only be made to the following fact: Early in 1906, when the London

representative of a well-known firm of manufacturing chemists, specialist in the ferments, called upon me, I

requested him to inform his firm that in my opinion the injections for use in cancer ought to contain all the ferments.

† The evidences of the truth of this will be found in the text under the description of the course of the York

case. The like facts wee also witnessed in the very similar course of the Naples case, and these scientific finds are

confirmed up to the hilt by the facts concerning the “liquefaction of cancer” in the living human body, as detailed

subsequently.

should treat these symptoms as they would the vomiting of pregnancy. I then found that for this and for

the covulsive illness sometimes happening in pregnancy, and known as “eclampsia,” there was no rational

treatment extant in medicine. So once again a new problem had to be solved embryologically. It was,

What induced these bad symptoms in pregnancy, leading up to eclampsia, and in cancer ending with the

continued injected of trypsin, in something identical with eclampsia? With continued improvements in

the treatment, especially in the preparation of the injections, when put up scientifically, these bad

symptoms do not now arise to anything like the extent that they die in 1906, for example. They were, in

an ascending sereies, nausea, vomiting, pain in the back, “sleeping in any position,” drowsiness, mental

and physical torpor, high arterial tension, and albuminuria, culminating on occasion in convulsions,

lasting several hours, with complete unconsciousness (coma). Only one case of the latter (mentioned

farther on) was ever reported to me. It happened that there was an extensive experimental study of

eclampsia in one of the German medical journals for 1905 by Professor Zweifel, as well as the report of a

lecture by him in the Munich Medizinische Wochenschrift (February 13, 1906). He concluded that

eclampsia was due to sarco-lactic acid in the foetal blood and placenta, but the conclusions appeared to

rest upon thin ice, and there may well have been other substances. Professor Zweifel’s name awakened

recollections of a former discovery of his, to the effect that amylopsin was not produced in the human

pancreas gland until some months after birth. I had never before had occasion to consider the import of

this fact embryologically, although I had worked over the whole course of gestation, studied its span, the

cause of birth, the

milk nutrition, etc., from the standpoint of the embryologist. Certain of my researches, published some

ten years earlier, when applied to the problem, furnished the solution with ease. One German medical

man has described the following advocacy of amylopsin in cancer as “fantastic,” which is merely a pious

“opinion,” not a scientific argument; but I am willing to admit that sometimes Nature may do things

which to some people, like a certain King of Spain, may appear to be “fantastic.” Whether it be a

“fantastic” fact or not, genuine amylopsin always does its work in the scientific treatment of cancer.

In the days of long ago, in our ancestry, as in that of all mammals, and as now happens in most

marsupials, like the kangaroo, opossum, etc., birth took place at what I have termed the “critical period.”

This is the moment in development when the embryo is first complete in all its parts. In a rabbit it is after

some fifteen days out of a total gestation of thirty; in a human being in the seventh week of pregnancy,

out of the total of nine months. With birth at this period the milk-nutrition was initiated. In this

amylopsin is not of any use, and can be dispensed with. When, as she did, Nature prolonged the

gestation, in order to bring the young into the world in a more perfect form, she deferred in so doing more

and more the start of the milk-nutrition. In prolonging the gestation, she forgot, or omitted to introduce,

amylopsin at an earlier period and not the “unconscious memory” remained that it was not needed until

the milk-period had passed. Consequently there is an absence of amylopsin during all foetal life. Usually

the difficulties caused by this can be surmounted if the mother produce sufficient amylopsin, but from the

seventh week of gestation pregnancy is a sorry business, owing to

This absence of amylopsin in the foetus. To this day, to my knowledge, such is the

“conservatism” of the medical profession, amylopsin has not been employed as an injection in

any case of threatened eclampsia.* But in cancer it has for some years past been used along with

trypsin, and it has never failed to perform its task of removing the bad symptoms. The first case

in which it was injected, in 1906, was that of a very distinguished artist and art-critic, who was

suffering from an advanced cancer, recurrent after three operations. I had previously told his

physician—a London one of high standing—when, almost to the day, his patient would develop

the bad symptoms. The first intimation was in a friendly letter written from the patient’s club by

himself, in the course of which he complained of being drowsy, and said finally that he could

hardly hole his pen for this reason. Then his physician wrote that the patient showed high arterial

tension and albuninuria, and that he was about to inject amylopsin. Under the influence of this

ferment all the symptoms vanished in two days. Had trypsin been as successful hitherto as

amylopsin in its mission in the treatment of cancer, very many who are now dead would still be

among us.

How the term “tryspin treatment” came to find its

*This is a very remarkable fact. To many physicians of both sexes the writer has explained the

scientific reasons for concluding that the source of eclampsia was to be sought and found in an absence or

deficiency of amylopsin in the maternal blood, to be remedied, of course, by hypodermic or intramuscular

injections of genuine amylopsin of 2,000 units of activity per cubic centimetre. So far as he is aware,

though more than one of these has expressed intentions of “trying” this scientific remedy, there is no single

case of actual or threatened eclampsia, in which such injections were made. Instead thereof, the barbarous

remedy of stripping the capsules of the kidneys is still often resorted to, and only recently a new device has

been sug-gested seriously—to wit, amputation of the breasts.

way into general use is still a mystery to me. It was, I believe, first employed by an anonymous

writer—still quite unknown to me—in the Daily Mail, somewhere about the end of January,

1906. It caught on, and nothing I could do ever altered the name of the treatment. But with

certain other happenings this use of the term “trypsin treatment” was a disastrous occurrence.

Since early in 1906 I have always used the designation of “the pancreatic or enzyme treatment.”

An “enzyme” is another name for a ferment. Again and again I have insisted upon the fact that a

“trypsin treatment” of cancer was about the most deadly remedy which could be devised. It is

impossible to estimate how many treated cases all over the world have failed from toxЊmia

owing directly to this use of trypsin without abundant amylopsin.

Particular attention may be directed to the following: The scientific treatment of cancer or

malignant disease advocated by me is not, and it never was, a “trypsin treatment.” From the days

of its first annunciation—December 13,1904, and January 20,1905—it was meant to be of

injections of “the secretion of that important digestive gland, the pancreas”—that is to say, of

pancreatic ferments, including both trypsin and amylopsin. I lay no claim what ever to have

“discovered” such a scientific absurdity as “that tryspin dissolved glycogen”—as water also

does—or the equally ridiculous one that it was a “property [of trypsin] without doubt of breaking

up glycogen in living tissues” (The Hospital, January 26, 1907, p. 297). I do not and have not,

“suggested” the use of secretin, or erepsin, or enterokinase, alon with one or both of the

pancreatic ferments mentioned above, just as little as that of soap or chian trupentine. I deal in

science, not in domestic commodities. None of these

things are in conformity with the enzyme treatment of cancer.

Moreover, it is not suggested in this book that the injection of 60,000 genuine tryptic

units and 120,000 amylolytic units in the space of four months will cause any and every

malignant tumour to shell out or encapsulate. At times a cancer may shell out on less, as

happened, for exaple, in the Naples case of inoperable cancer of the tongue. In others, again, a

much more vigorous treatment, for all I know, may be needed. Thus, the case in which, to my

knowledge, the greatest number of tryptic units was ever injected in a given time was one of

multiple scarcoma. In this case, in eight weeks, according to my calculations, 84,000 tryptic

units, and only about 16,800 amylolytic units, of the strongest injections then on sale, wee given.

Several of the tumours did, indeed, disappear, but, so far as I am aware, the patient was not cured

of sarcoma. Attention may be directed to the comparatively small amount of amylopsin

employed, and it is my suspicion that the case failed from toxЊmia, due to this lack of amylopsin.

This case was treated in the early1907, and at that time the very great importance of large

injections of amylopsin had not been recognized. The trypsin injection used in this case of

multiple sarcoma contained 500 tryptic and 100 amylolytic units per cubic centimetre or ampoule.

Owing to these facts, the course of treatment, doses, etc., cannot be compared with that adopted

by Captain Lambelle which such conspicuous success. At all events, genuine trypsin was

injected, and Dr. H.O.S. did not condemn the treatment. If a malignant tumour posses an enzyme

(ferment) totally different from that (trypsin) widely present, according to Vernon, in traces in

normal tissues, surely that is a fact of supreme significance and import. Since

1904 one of my main theses has been that, just as in normal development there was an antithesis

or opposite character, of two generations—sexual and asexual respectively—so the like antithesis

obtained, of necessity, in the ferments employed by these for their nutrition. The ferments of the

asexual generation or trophoblast were therefore the antitheses or opposites of the pancreatic

ferments, trypsin and amylopsin; and as cancer was in nature asexual generation (trophoblast), so

its ferments mush be identical with those employed by the trophoblast of normal development.

All life-processes take place through the action of ferments, and without these there would be no

life, such as we know it. It follows from this that the action of cancer ferments upon substances

on which trypsin and amylopsin, or normal cell-ferments, will also act, cannot be the same as that

of the latter; that is, the products of the fermentation must be different when used upon the same

sub-stratum. The proof of this, and the answer in the affirmative to the above question, has really

been furnished quite recently by German scientific chemists. In the paper by Professor Neuberg,

already cited (p. 12), he writes that “Comprehensive investigations into unusual ferment

phenomena of tumours have been made by E. Abderhalden, with P. Rona, A.H. Koelker, F.

Medigreceanu, and L. Pincussohn. They showed that often, but not constantly in human and

animal tumours enzymes can be detected which split up polypeptids and peptones quicker than

normal cell-ferments do. In addition, it was established that extracts of caner (die KrebssКfte)

split up polypeptids in entirely atypical fashion. While, for example, normally cell-ferments

hydrolize d-alanyl-glycyl-glycin to d-alanin and glycyl-glycyl, tumour fluid splits it into glycocoll

and d-alanyl-glycin. The pulling

down (Abbau) of cancer (carcinoma) takes place thus at quite other points (Stellen) of the animoacid

compounds that those at which all other peptolytic ferments attack.” All this is in complete

accord with the scientific foundations of the enzyme treatment of cancer, and it is exactly what

one might expect under the view of the trophoblastic or asexual nature of cancer, advocated by

me. As Blumenthal urges, it alone, apart from all other considerations, is sufficient to refute and

render untenable the “embryonic views,” such as the Remak-Cohnheim one. Professor

Abderhalden, in speaking of the foregoing finds, remarks that it is improbable that the atypical

pulling-down of the silk peptone is accidental, and he describes the enzymes concerned in this al

“atypical ferments of tumours.” Again, Yosimoto found that the proteolytic autolysis

(albuminous self-digestion) of cancerous liver was much increased over the normal, not only in

the tumour portion, but in those free from tumour. Neuberg, studying the like self-digestion of

liver-cancer, discovered a characteristic produce—fiz., reducing pentose, which in the selfdigestion

of normal liver is not produced.

In the Third (and latest) Report of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1908) the word

“ferment” occurs but twice in its 440 pages. Dr. W. Cramer writes (p. 433): “The effect which a

growing tumour produces on a normal organism* is a problem of nutrition similar to the growth

of a foetus in a pregnant animal. It cannot be explained by attributing to a cancer-cell the

formation of pathogenic substances of a hypothetical nature, such as a ‘cancer ferment,’ or a

‘cancer toxin.’” The reader will not how this is rendered in the Introduction to the Report by the

Editor: “Dr. Cramer’s paper shows how

*A “normal position” is here understood to mean a rat inoculated with a malignant tumour.

precise bio-chemical methods can now be applied to the study of the growth of cancer, and brings

new and exact information as to the nature of the relations existing between the tumour and the

animal bearing it. The effect which a growing tumour produces upon a normal organism is the

problem of nutrition similar to the growth of a foetus in a pregnant animal; it cannot be explained

by assuming the formation of pathogenic ‘cancer ferments’ or ‘cancer toxins.’” In the foregoing

the italics are mine, and they are introduced to draw attention to the method of citing the “new

and exact information.”

As demonstrating the exact opposite of this information, one may cite the following

recent words of Blumenthal and Neuberg: “Moreover, we consider the question of the abnormal

enzymatic (ferment) processes in tumours as completely cleared up, since it has also been

answered in a positive sense by Abderhalden and his colleagues, working with quite other

methods.” The original German of this passage will be found in a short article by Blumenthal

and Neuberg on “Proteolytische Fermente der Krebszelle,” in 1909; also to the same author, in

Zeitschr. F. Kresborchung, vol. X., 1910; and to Blumenthal, “Ergebnisse der Physiologie,” “Die

chemische VorgКange bei der Krebskrankeit,” pp. 363-428, 1910; separate edition of the memoir

(Asher-Spiro, Berlin), 1910.

In a review of Bainbridge’s report, the Lancet (October 9, 1909, p. 1079) states: “A

negative result of this kind has the great value we have indicated, in that the medical profession

have before them chapter and verse

for their placing no faith in trypsin, and none in persons who persist in advocating its use by

repeating stories of alleged ‘cures’ when, as a matter of fact, the patients referred to have been

proved to have died from the disease.” Scientifically, it is not necessary to do more than insist on

the fallacy of lying any stress at all upon “a negative result,” and in the present instance this

happens to be specially true, for “the medical profession,” if it were “placing faith” in the

evidences furnished by Bainbridge’s report, would find it now difficult, but impossible, to cite

from it any real scientific grounds for this. The “chapter” may be found easily, for the “scientific

report” has been scattered broadcast, but the “verse” is a present blank. In the chemical

experiment the observer must satisfy, not only himself concerning his reagents, but also the

requirements of science.

As Bainbridge employed five different strengths of trypsin injections, of which the

strongest is stated to have been six time the strength of the weakest, and as he furnished no

particulars to show in which cases each of these injections had been employed, or the total

number and sizes of the doses in a given time, the “chapter and verse” of his evidence can carry

no sort of conviction to any logical mind. The reference to patients “proved to have died from the

disease” in the citation above is, of course, to the single case of Miss K. H., which has never once

been cited by me as a “cure,” or even believed for a moment to have been “cured.” This case

(No. 7 of Bainbridge’s report) furnishes a far more useful and instructive object-lesson of the

value of surgery in cancer than of trypsin and amylopsin.

The following is the history of this case as give on pp. 20 and 21 of Bainbridge’s report:

“Duration of disease previous to enzyme treatment: about three

years. Previous treatment: removal of growth from left breast, June 4, 1904 (Dr. Edward W.

Peet); radical operation refused. About one year later thirty-two X-ray treatments (Dr. William J.

Morton); trypsin, 5 to 10 minim doses, April 27, to October 31, 1906 (Dr. Morton). Radical

operation, November 3, 1906 (Bainbridge). Removal of enlarge nodules and secondary deposits

in skin, January 22, 1907 (Bainbridge). Condition when enzyme treatment was begun: full

enzyme treatment instituted twenty-four days after radical operation. Recurrent, irremovable

cancer of left side of chest and glands of neck; liver enlarge, probably cancerous; general

condition poor.” This is a fair sample of what surgically is understood by “a thorough, scientific

test.” According to the above the cancer of the breast had existed for not far short of three years,

and the case had failed twice surgically before a real enzyme treatment was, as a last resort,

undertaken.

Dr. Morton’s treatment with 5 to 10 minims of “trypsin” thrice weekly during some six

months in 1906 may be dismissed as no treatment at all. I doubt whether with the strengths then

on sale, which no endeavours of mine could persuade manufacturers to increase, the patient

received in all more than one of the doses mentioned in this book—viz., 1,000 tryptic units.

According to Bainbridge’s report, and its author, as the surgeon concerned, perhaps knows the

facts better than any anonymous critic, the order of events was the very opposite of that usually

assumed. The knife failed twice before Bainbridge evoked the ferments. There might, indeed, be

some point, if little truth, in the statement here referred to, had the patient derived any benefit at

all from “submission to the knife.”

Looking back over the field of my researches since the

summer of 1888, twenty-three years ago, at various phases of the journey, it was all a lonely

pilgrimage

“Towards the unknown region,

Where neither ground is for the feet,

Nor any path to follow.”

WHITTIER

New problems, entailing fresh, patient labours, constantly arose, and the solutions of these

brought, invariable, new surprise in their train. The start of the work was the discovery of a

transient nervous apparatus in the development of a fish; this was the one end of the slender

thread. Its unravelling was always intensely interesting and absorbing to the observer, and the

thread went on, and on, and on, always continuously, unlike any other thread of research known

to me in the whole history of embryology. Then, at last, the other end came in sight, twenty-five

years after the observer first began, in Semper’s old research institute in the ancient University of

Würzburg, to learn from the master how research problems were to be approached, dealt with,

and solved. The story of this is told in Chapter VI.

The first piece of work upon the thread occupied some five or six years; for that time was

required to work out, night after night, and put together the results, which are recorded, with eight

plates, in the memoir upon “The History of a Transient Nervous Apparatus” (1896). This was

clearly an asexual structure, the work upon it a prelude to the cancer investigations. There are,

indeed, published researches extant, such as Professor A. Goette’s immense monograph upon the

development of a toad, Bombinator, which took a longer time; but, so far as I know the literature

of embryology, there is no other embryological monograph which covers so long a period of

development, or span of time, some seventeen

months, as this. It is nearly twice the length of time of a human pregnancy from conception to

birth.

But this is not the place to write a history of a quarter of a century’s researches in

embryology. Suffice it to say that the chain of researches is now a complete one, every link has

been tested, and no flaw discovered. As one outcome of this systematic investigation, a single

case of successful cure of malignant disease, quite apart from others recorded in the published

literature, is brought before the whole work, and the invitation is give that any test of its truth be

applied to it. All the methods employed are published in full. The remedies suggested and the

modes of using them may be rejected or ignored; but the truth, if scientific truth have any place at

all in this world, must be admitted. The facts are: that in a case of malignant disease, termed by

the pathologists a “round-celled sarcoma”—named by me, scientifically, irresponsible trophoblast

or asexual generation—which was recurrent and inoperable after two extensive surgical

operations upon it; the remains of the tumour, under the influence of the all-powerful ferments,

trypsin and amylopsin, finally shelled out, leaving the patient free from all trace of malignant

disease, and, in fact, “cured.” I ask that these scientific fact, which cannot be denied, be admitted,

and that with this the tardy acknowledgment be made, that when, on January 20,1905, a scientific

man, whose sole object was the revelation of the truths of Nature, stated publicly that “in the

secretion of that important digestive gland, the pancreas,” Nature had provided a potent remedy

for cancer: what he then said was nothing more than scientific truth, which is the greatest of all

truth.

This, Nature’s remedy, may be taken or left; but the truth may be denied no longer. It is

beyond my power

to prevent mankind, in happy ignorance of what the cycle of life really is, from awaiting some

other solution of the problems. In doing this futile thing mankind may watch, and hope, and pray,

until the crack of doom; but all in vain. Even if the scientific solution were to dawn upon official

research, it could—in this universe, at all events, and as it is constituted—be none other than that

offered by Nature! No denial can any longer have the smallest value against the supreme truth,

that when properly—that is scientifically-applied, the pancreatic ferments, trypsin and amylopsin,

being the most powder things in the whole range of organic nature, are efficacious agents against

cancer.

At the present time science and scientific research are not things to be made light of, to be

scoffed at and jeered at in the market-place, or to be ignored. With the publication of the facts

contained in this book, the responsibility is shifted to other shoulders than those of the scientific

observer. All I ask is, that these truths of Nature, which she has given as a revelation of

boundless and priceless import to a world which was not ready for them—that these shall not be

denied, but be received reverently as what they are—true facts of Nature. Cancer is a natural

phenomenon, not a disease; although it may bring disease in its train. Its treatment—that of a

natural phenomenon—has been committed legally, logically, rationally, and scientifically not to

the hands of the scientific observer, who has discovered its origin and nature. It is the business of

the scientific observer, not that of the medical man or surgeon, to study and elucidate natural

phenomena. Let the truth be acknowledged

for its own sake. As the writer is “not even a medical practitioner,” the adoption of the treatment

in all or any cases of cancer is not compulsory; but it may not for a moment be imagined that

scientifically it is intended to make good the failures of surgery.*

The statement made in this book that cancer is a natural phenomenon, not a disease is

unassailable. It rests upon scientific evidences, which are impregnable against all attacks; but it

may be questioned whether civilized mankind as a whole has any real conceptions of the nature

of natural phenomena in general. Some are beneficent. The sun rises, and its heat and light

render this earth habitable to man. Owing to natural phenomena, the seasons return in orderly

fashion, bringing, among other things, spring, with its fresh, new green; summer, with its wealth

of flower; and autumn, with its harvest of fruit and grain. Other natural phenomenon are

maleficent—malignant. The volcano, also a natural phenomenon, has in the past buried or

destroyed countless cities; and even in our own day this has happened. Some naturalists have

been of opinion that the fossil remains of innumerable animals, now extinct—often found in great

multitudes heaped together-owed their present existence, as imperfect records of past events, to

catastrophes which were also

*While for the sake of humanity the enzyme treatment may be refused to no case of cancer,

recurrent after one or more operation, if such cases fail, from the point of view of pure science, they may

not be regarded and cited as “test cases”; for in them there always lies the possible source of error of

experiment of previous operative interference. With a positive result, as in the York case, such a case

becomes, on the other hand, a test one of the severest description; for in it success has been obtained, in

spite of the existence of the possible source of error.

natural phenomena. Last, cancer, with all its malignancy—a thing which laughs to scorn the

impotence of the surgeon’s knife, which yearly claims its thousands upon thousands of human

victims *–is at its scientific basis only a maleficent natural phenomenon, such as these. We come

into being and exist as human beings because of beneficent natural phenomena, and as human

beings we continue, for a span of time, to subsist, in spite of maleficent natural phenomena. The

course of some natural phenomena is unalterable by human agency; others, again, by a

knowledge of the working of Nature, of science, can have their maleficent action stemmed and

averted; and, as a scientific man, I affirm that cancer belongs to the category of these.

To those, surgeons and others, who have not, like the writer, foolishly devoted their lives

to scientific research and experiment, but wisely to more mundane pursuits—such as the

acquirement of wealth—let the following warnings be uttered: “If you wish to set up what you

term ‘test cases,’ pray let them be such as shall fulfil in every way the requirements of science.

Do not vitiate your experiments from the very start, as has happened, by choosing some 66 per

cent. Of the cases, in which there lay the pernicious ‘error of experiment’ of previous surgical

operation, once or several times over. Remember also that if your cases be chosen rightly—that

is, scientifically—even then there remain the reagents employed, and how used. Do not forget

that in this, as in every scientific chemical experiment, the observer must not only satisfy himself

regarding his reagents, but be prepared,

*On the basis of the present population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

(45,000,000), the tribute exacted by malignant disease in a single century would be not less than 3,875,000

human lives, or over 100 daily; for India 27 millions.

if called upon to do so, to produce scientific evidences concerning their nature and composition.*

Above all, do not for a moment imagine that you ‘have tried trypsin in cancer, and have found it

useless,’ when to all intents and purposes you might just as well have been testing the effects of a

solution of glycerine and water. Do not think it is ‘science’ to perform mere elementary

qualitative experiments upon your injections, showing that they have some action upon starch and

upon white of egg. Lastly, under the erroneous idea that it thereby makes the thing a scientific

document, do not publish any account of your negative experiments with trypsin and amylopsin

with the sub-title, “A Scientific Report,’ unless the document in question fulfil, like my scientific

memoirs and like this book, in all respects the requirements of science.”

The greatest exaction of science is truth. This is why the expression, “scientific truth,” is

so far-reaching and invincible. In the opening passages of this Introduction two points were

referred to, and to them at its close I return. “There is,” said Tyndall, in somewhat different

words, “in the true scientific man a desire far greater than to have his conclusions ‘generally

accepted’: it is the ardent wish to see them verified in fact.” Again, it was pointed out that the

problems of the origin, nature, etc., of cancer formed but a special case, a side-issue, of the

application of a general principle. This general principle, revealed by my researches of more than

twenty years, was of an antithetic alternation of generations with a continuity of germ-cells from

generation to generation as the basis of the cycle of life. This, the law of animal development,

waw what during many years of research Carl Ernst von Baer groped for, but in vain. In this

*Apparently this rule of science has no applications in official cancer research.

connection a confession on p. 451 of von Baer’s “Autobiography” (second edition, 1886) is of

great interest. Here, in a review of his own published embryological researches, he writes: “Und

der Generations-Weschsel schleuderte mich ganz zurück” (And the alternation of generations

threw me right back). As the reader will find a subsequent chapter, there are grounds for

supposing that the like difficulties connected with alternation of generations interfered with the

researches of another great embryologist, Johannes Müller. It required, in fact, the later botanical

investigations of Hofmeister and others to furnish a new basis for attacking this fundamental

problem of alternation of generations in animals. Sixty years after von Baer published his

investigations I began mine—in the summer of 1888. These researches certainly lasted far longer

than his, and their completion only came nearly twenty years later, with the final overthrow and

rout of cancer. This latter, including the physical fact of the actual liquefaction of living cancer in

the living human body, and embracing the true cure of malignant disease in the single case—a

test one for all time—of Lambelle’s ex-drummer in York has a far wider import and deeper

bearing than its applications in medicine, and for the welfare of humanity. The scientific

investigator is bound, on occasion, to divest himself of his humanity, and to look at his problems

and their solutions in cold-blooded fashion. He must draw the conclusions, even though the

heavens fall. This I shall now proceed to do in brief, reserving a fuller treatment for some other

place and occasion.

For the past century, to go no farther back innumerable attempts have been made—all in

vain—to solve the problems of cancer, or malignant disease. In Dr. Jacob Wolff’s monumental

work, “Die Lehre

von der Krebskrankheir,” vol. i., the list of investigators given includes more than a thousand

names—to be exact 1,004. Why, of these, did 1,003 fail, and but a single on succeed? The

answer to this is not far to seek, and, indeed, it is contained in the true solution which is detailed

in the following pages. All scientific research, to be successful in the end and enduring, must

start in correct principles, or, at any rate, not in false ones. Until in recent years a practical

embryologist of long-working experience applied the general principle of an antithetic alternation

of generations to the problem of cancer, it had always been attacked from the standpoints of three

embryological dogmas, which have this in common—that they are false, though “generally

accepted.” These are epigenesis, or direct building-up of the embryo from the products of the

fertilized egg (Harvey and Wolff); somatic origin of germ-cells, as “chips” of the “old block”

(Huxley); and recapitulation in development, as maintained by Haeckel and his followers. If

these doctrines, which are pretty “generally accepted,” were true, if they contained a particle of

truth, the solutions of the problems of cancer would follow inevitably out of them. If they were

false, as they are, their applications to cancer could but lead to failure, and this has been the case.

Years ago, as opposed to these dogmas and as scientifically true, I set up, on grounds of

observation, the three doctrines of evolution with predestination (Weismann anticipating me in

this), a morphological continuity of germ-cells, and an antithetic alternation of generations.

This trilogy of doctrines is in reality one and indivisible. If this trilogy were scientifically

correct, its application to the problems of cancer must end in their resolution, and this has, in fact,

happened. It would not have

taken place under any constitution of the visible universe other than the one which includes this

general principle of an antithetic alternation of generations as the basis of the cycle of life of

animals and plants. It would have been lacking, were this general principle untrue, had my

researches since 1888 been false as well as “heterodox.” Were direct development or epigenesis,

somatic origin of germ-cells, etc. Nature’s method, cancer would not, could not, have been

liquefied by injections of pancreatic ferments in London, New York, Berlin, and York; no

malignant tumours at all would have disappeared under the influence of injections of pancreatic

ferments; and Lambelle’s ex-pensioned drummer would long ago have perished miserably from

the ravages of malignant disease, as countless other cases still do every day, week, and year all

over this earth. It follows that the current dogmas of direct development or epigenesis, set up in

the eighteenth century by the researches of Harvey and Caspar Friedrich Wolff, somatic origin of

germ-cells, and recapitulation in development which are taught in all, or almost all, the

Universities of the civilized world, and which are supposed to underlie the sciences of

embryology, zoology, and anatomy, not to mention physiology and pathology, etc.—that these

are false, even though they be “orthodox.” Therefore, the general principle of an antithetic

alternation of generations has not only resulted in the overthrow and rout of cancer, but its

decisive success in this has demonstrated how necessary it is, in the interest of truth itself, that

without further delay—unless scientific truth have ceased to be a requirement of science—the

scientific house be put in order, the false dogmas be cast out and rejected as worthless, and the

Golden Rule of an antithetic alternation of generations be set up as a fundamental scientific

general principle of the sciences of

life—embryology, biology, etc. Orthodoxy will not in science render false doctrines true, and

Tyndall’s words become a mere mockery and delusion unless they apply to the embryologist and

biologist, as well as to the physicist and chemist.

Twenty years ago my general principle—an antithetic alternation of generations with a

continuity of germ-cells from generation to generation as the basis of the cycle of life—was

almost within my grasp; that is, had almost been established by facts of observation. After a few

more years of patient research this was so—at last. Those, and those only, who know and

appreciate the history of the growth of human scientific knowledge—“The Growth of Truth”

(Osler) can realize the true import of this. Two of the greatest scientific investigators of the

nineteenth century were Hermann von Helmholtz and Louis Pasteur. As investigator they were

incomparable, beyond comparison with others or with each other. What the latter thought about

general principles in scientific research is cited, else in this book, and it may be found in full in

his live, “La Vie de Pasteur,” written by Vallery-Radot. The illustrious physicist and

physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz, wrote his view in the following beautiful lines: “When,

from a correct general principle, one develops the conclusions in special case of its application,

new surprises, for which one was not previously prepared, always make their appearance. And

since the conclusions unfold, not according to the author’s caprice, but after their own laws, it has

been made the impression upon me that really it was not my own work which I wrote down, but

merely the work of another.”*

* “Wenn man aus einem richtigen Allgemeinen Principe die Folgerungen in den einzelnen FКllen

seiner Anwendung für sich entwickelt, so kommen immer neue Жberraschungen zum Vor-

The general principle of an antithetic alternation of generations has now been applied to

the special case of the natural phenomenon knows as “cancer,” or “malignant disease.” Even

though this had been in the York case alone, at the hands of Captain Lambelle, it has proved itself

to be capable of solving the enigmas of cancer, of explaining it scientifically, and of coping with

it successfully. Not only so, but in the sequel it has turned out—and it is no accident—that at its

basis this general principle merges into a certain other one, laid bare by the researches of

“Pasteur, van t’Hoff, and Le Bel. This, which relates to the asymmetry of naturally occurring

organic compounds, rests upon a foundation-stone of the visible universe, the asymmetrical

carbon atom. It is this which is the true and only scientific basis of the science of stereochemistry,

and, as my researches have shown for all time, of the sciences of life, embryology and

biology. The problems of cancer were vulnerable along two different lines of attack—

embryology and stereo-chemistry. While official cancer research has failed hitherto to follow up

either line of attack, the writer, in his private cancer studies, has developed both of these—the

only possible points of attack—and along both the “divisions” and “brigades” have achieved the

complete overthrow and decisive rout of Cancer.

(footnotes from page 46)

schein, auf die man vorher nicht gefasst war. Und da sich die Folgerungen nicht nach der Willkür des

Autor, sondern nach ihren eigenen Gesetze entwickeln, so hat es mir oft den Eindruck gemacht, als wКre es

gar nicht meine eigene Arbeit, die ich niederschreibe, sondern als ob ich nur die Arbeit eines Anderen

neiderschriebe” (From a letter written to Sir William Thomson [Lord Kelvin] in 1860).

PART 1

THE PROBLEMS OF CANCER

CHAPTER 1

EMBRYOLOGICAL ASPECTS AND ETIOLOGY OF CARCINOMA*

At a time when so much is being attempted in the investigation of the problem of the nature of

cancer, it may appear presumptuous on the part of an embryologist to express opinions and

conclusions regarding this grave question. It has long been a subject of earnest research by

physicians and pathologists, who naturally are familiar with actual facts and finds concerning

carcinoma, foreign to the embryologist. But hitherto the physician and the surgeon, the

pathologist and the gynЊcologist, have failed utterly to establish anything concerning the etiology

of cancer, and without the intervention of the embryologist success may be as distant in the future

as in the past.

As indicated by the above title, the present chapter is intended to deal with aspects of

carcinoma as they strike an embryologist, and not every embryologist, but one particular

investigator. At the outset it may be asked, “Is the etiology of carcinoma an embryological

problem?” As the thing itself and its manifestations demonstrably fall within the province of the

surgeon and the pathologist, for it confronts them almost daily, it is possibly not

*The Lancet, June 21, 1902.

very clear why the problem of the nature of cancer should be an embryological one at all. It is a

disease carrying with it death and destruction. On the other hand, the problems of the

embryologist, as generally understood, treat not of disease, but of the blossoming-forth of life

itself—of the phenomena which culminate in the appearance of new living beings. Death and

decay would seem to be things of which, from his researches, the embryologist might be expected

to obtain no practical knowledge. He is supposed to be concerned with “das Werden,” while das

Vergehen” is beyond the scope of his researches. Would that it were so! Unless he shut his eyes

to plain facts, “das Vergehen” in the midst of das Werden”—death in budding life itself—is

continually before him.

The conviction impressed upon the writer’s mind from many years devoted to the study

of the mode of the development of the higher animals, the vertebrata, is that everywhere and at

any point atrophy and death and degeneration of cell, of organs, of organism, of embryos

themselves, are among the commonest phenomena under the eyes of the embryologist. His

textbooks, even his published researches, may be silent of these; for, as a rule, he believes himself

to be concerned solely with the coming-into-being; and the opposite aspect, the decline of life, he

leaves severely alone. It is not, in his tacit opinion, a theme of the science of embryology. This

view of the problems of the science has for many years failed to commend itself to the writer, and

in his own researches he has endeavoured to take account of everything happening and capable of

being observed during the developmental cycle, whether progressive or retrogressive.

The manifestations of life present themselves under the headings of either form and

structure, or function. Embryological research deals largely with form and structure, or, more

exactly, with the coming about of these. And as, according to the testimony of pathologist,

cancer, when it appears, is something new to the organism,–a neoplasm, a foreign thing, not

growing and functioning after the manner of the individual containing it, increasing by celldivision

after unknown laws, which appear to defy all law, carrying with it widespread eroding

destruction, only comparable to that dealt out by some parasites—the phenomena of cancer would

have analogies at least to many such lying within the domain of the embryologist. Cancer is

something with a beginning; it increases like a developing embryonic germ by cell-division; it

invades territory at first foreign to it, and it differs only from a parasitic organism in the fact that

its mode of reproduction is what may be defined as asexual. And thus, while as a rule its cycle is

limited to the individual harbouring it, carcinoma is something with for itself an indefinite lifecycle,

which is only bounded by the life of its host, but which cannot be carried directly over, by

germs or fertilized gametes, to another organism.* That the resemblance between the life-cycle

of a cancer and that of a higher animal should be incomplete is natural; for the former is an

abnormal product, and it is in the nature of such to differ in some or other important details from

the typical or normal.

The problem of the nature of cancer has long been before the writer in his investigations;

in fact, ever since

*It has, however, been shown by Hanau and Wehr to be possible to transplant cancer from one

individual—e.g., the dog—to another.

he learnt, from the researches of Welms* and other, that it had been encountered occasionally

along with those curious tumours, the “dermoid cysts” of ovary or testis—the “embryomata,” or

rudimentary embryos of Wilms. The latter speaks of this occasional connection † of the two—it

had in 1902, according to Wilms, been observed some nine times—as a remarkable fact (p. 86),

in that, in an organism of one or two years of age, the development of carcinoma can happen. As

this relates to the presumed age of the embryoma, and not to that of the individual harbouring the

latter, the validity of the conclusion is not apparent. On his part the writer must reject it. For the

past two year, from time to time, in researches upon the germ-cells, observations have been made

which appeared to have bearings upon the nature of carcinoma. ‡ This period may not seem a

long one; but beyond it life the investigations of other twelve years, without which the standpoint

of to-day would be an impossibility. If, therefore, no study of cancers underlie the present

chapter, the approach of the problem is not a sudden one; but it as been preceded by prolonged

observation, and, moreover, animal life is the same whether it be that of a hyroid polype upon a

shell of the seashore, or that of a cancer within an individual of the human race.

The immediate cause of the present writing was as follows: In a recent paper, dealing

with the understudy theory of heredity, in an altogether different connection,

* Wilms, Max, “Жber die Dermoidcysten und Teratome,” etc. in Deutsches Archiv f. klin. Med., v.

55,1895, pp. 1-108, Pl. 3; also Martin, “die Krankheiten des Eierstockes,” etc., Leppzic, 1899, pp. 576-614.

† Chorio-epithelioma, even in the male, and usually in the testis, has, of recent years, turned out to

be not uncommon.

‡ Some years ago, at Liverpool, Mr. H. J. Styles, F.R.C.S., published figures of all the supposed

“cancer-parasites,” and showed what they really wee. All of these have been seen by the writer in

degenerating germ-cells of development.

a few comments had been written down upon the mode of growth exhibited by certain organisms,

and a comparison drawn between this and the pernicious growth of the human chorion in certain

cases.* And it was not until long after the proof had been returned that is was seen how in this

comparison the key to the problem of the nature of cancer had been given away. If the pernicious

growth of the chorion be really carcinomatous—and it is recognized † as such by pathologists

under the names of malignant placentoma, deciduoma, chorio-epithelioma or destructive

placental ploype ‡–the nature of cancer is clear as the light of day. And it has seemed desirable

to offer the present essay, in order that at least a warning note might thereby be uttered, and an

earnest attempt made to point to the futility of investigation in the direction of a cul-de-sac, such

as the probable one of cancer, as due to unicellular organisms.

In the following, the facts concerning carcinoma, as

*The passage in question is as follows: “It should be mentioned that De Vries and

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