Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915 – PDF

Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915 – eBook PDF

In Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915, (PDF) Alan I Marcus examines a comparatively understudied period in the history of cancer by giving a careful investigation of the first public crusade to find the cause of cancer. The search for cancer’s cause during the stimulating era of bacteriology was colored by the Germ Theory of Disease. Academics had demonstrated in malady after malady that each disease was the result of a specific and singular pathogenic agent. That model led investigators to hopefully conclude that they would soon find the source of what was labeled the “emperor of all maladies,” cases of which were seemingly increasing at a prodigious rate worldwide.

In this accessible history of medicine and science, Marcus reveals the complex story of the efforts made from 1875 through 1915 to first master and, failing that, to control cancer—a dual approach that stays in force to this day. He discloses the messiness of real-time scientific research, tracing the repeated lists of promises, discoveries of hope, and the unavoidable despair that always followed. Other hurdles existed to the research, such as inter-laboratory competition, inconsistency in test standards, and mistrust. Researchers approached cancer from such different specialties as botany, chemistry, clinical medicine, zoology, nutrition, pathology, bacteriology, and microbiology. Though they came from diverse fields, each steadfastly maintained that cancer operated in an analogous fashion to other bacteriological diseases.

Almost every country and a slew of various investigators and clinicians waged this first war on cancer, operating in strangely diverse scientific venues. Cancer laboratories and hospitals, in addition to organizations like the American Cancer Society, were born out of this first offensive on cancer. Even as cancer continues to spread today, these institutions that initially formed to defeat cancer over a hundred years ago stay and continue to expand.

Review

“This ebook is an interesting and careful investigation of a topic that has been much ignored. The work definitely has consequences for what we are doing today in cancer research.” — K. Codell Carter, author of The Rise of Causal Concepts of Disease

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