Medicine: Cancer Army

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Medical Help, Specialists in the diagnosis of cancer are now within the reach of every U. S. citizen. Some are pathologists who analyze bits of tissue cut from suspected cancers. Others are X-ray specialists who interpret radiograms of suspected bones and internal organs. To extend this diagnostic knowledge, Dr. Francis Carter Wood, director of Columbia University's Cancer Institute, is preparing a Diagnostic Atlas of Tumors which should be ready next year. The International Union Against Cancer sponsored the work. The Chemical Foundation pays expenses, and will market the finished atlas for $8.

Treatment of cancer is not so progressive. Five thousand years ago Egyptian doctors used caustic salves to destroy cancers and scalpels to excise them. To day surgeons use scalpels and electric cauteries to excise cancers. And radiologists use X-rays and radium to destroy them. An occasional patient recovers after treatment with colloidal lead or the germ of erysipelas, or with this or that sub stance. But so do some patients who get no treatment whatsoever.

There are seven hospitals in the U. S. which specialize only in cancer cases.

These are : in Manhattan, Memorial, and N. Y. City Cancer Institute; in St. Louis, Barnard Free Skin and Cancer; in Buffalo, State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease; in Philadelphia, Oncologic; in Boston, Huntington Memorial; in Wrentham, Mass., Pondville. In addition there are 200 hospitals certified by the American College of Surgeons as having excellent cancer clinics.

In preparation is the very first treatise on the Treatment of Cancer & Allied Diseases. Editors George Thomas Pack and Edward M. Livingston, both of Manhattan, started the work two years ago, required the help of 140 international authorities, are filling 1,600 to 2,000 printed pages, may get through this autumn and give publisher Paul B. Hoeber of Manhattan opportunity to market the volume for about $20.

Control of Cancer began in a small way in 1913 when a few doctors organized the American Society for the Control of Cancer. Campaigns to teach people that cancer was not a "shameful" disease and to teach doctors to look for cancers gradually spread over the country under direction of Dr. George Albert Soper, sanitary engineer. Then Mrs. Robert G. Mead. Manhattan socialite, raised an endowment of $1,000,000 and Dr. Little, a geneticist who had recently resigned from the presidency of the University of Michigan, took charge in 1929.