Read Online The Cancer Chronicles by George Johnson - Free Book Online

was born. What emerged was an elegantly published, sparsely printed little book,
Palaeo-Oncology.
I felt lucky to find a copy on the Internet for one hundred dollars. Its fifty-eight pages are bound in a blue cover with gilded print, and below the title is a drawing of a crab. “Crab” in Greek is
karkinos,
and Hippocrates, in the fifth century B.C., used the word—it became the root of “carcinogen” and “carcinoma”—for the affliction whose Latin name is cancer.
    It is not clear exactly why he chose the name. Some six hundred years later,Galen of Pergamon speculated on the etymology: “As a crab is furnished with claws on both sides of its body, so, in this disease, the veins which extend from the tumour represent with it a figure much like that of a crab.” The story is repeated in almost every history of cancer. Very few tumors, however, look like crabs.Paul of Aegina, a seventh-century Byzantine Greek, suggested that the metaphor was meant to be taken more abstractly: “Some say that [cancer] is so calledbecause it adheres with such obstinacy to the part it seizes that, like the crab, it cannot be separated from it without great difficulty.” The word
karkinoi
was also applied to grasping tools like calipers.
    All but forgotten is a very different derivation from Louis Westenra Sambon, a British expert on parasitology who, before his death in 1931, turned his attention to the study of cancer. There is a parasite,
Sacculina carcini,
that feasts on crabs in a manner eerily similar to the feasting of acancerous tumor. The process was described in 1936 in a report by the pathologist SirAlexander Haddow to theRoyal Society of Medicine:
    [I]t attaches itself to the body of a young crab, and casts off every part of its economy save a small bundle of all-important cells. These penetrate the body of the host and come to rest on the underside of the latter’s intestine, just beneath the stomach. Here, surrounded by a new cuticle, they shape themselves into the “sacculina interna,” and like a germinating bean-seedling, proceed to throw out delicately branching suckers which, root-like, extend through every portion of the crab’s anatomy to absorb nourishment. Growing in size, the parasite presses upon the underlying walls of the host’s abdomen, causing them to atrophy, so that when the crab moults, a hole is left in this region corresponding in size to the body of the parasite. Through this opening the tumour-like body finally protrudes and becomes the mature “sacculina externa,” free to deliver the active young into the open waters.
    Long before the days of Galen, disciples of Hippocrates, dining on crabs, may have noticed the similarities between the way the parasite overtakes its host and the way a cancermetastasizes.
    Whatever the reason for the name, ancient Greek texts describe what sound like cancer of the uterus and the breast. Driven by a belief in sympathetic magic, some physicians would treat a tumorby placing a live crab on top of it. They also recommended powders and ointments (sometimes made from pulverized crabs) or cauterization (burning closed the ulceration). As for patients with internal tumors, Hippocrates warned that they might best be left alone: “With treatment they soon die, whereas without treatment they survive for a long time.” The principle is part of theHippocratic oath: First do no harm.
    With Galen the references become even sharper. He wrote anentire book about tumors and included malignancies ina category of growth called
“praeter naturam”
—preternatural, meaning outside of nature.Carcinoma, he wrote, is “a tumor malignant and indurated, ulcerated or non-ulcerated.” He found breastcancer to be the mostcommon and especially prevalent aftermenopause. (In contradiction to what modern oncologists believe, he wrote that women who regularly menstruate don’t get cancer.) He writes about uterine, intestinal, andanal cancer, and cancer of the palate. Sometimes he,