Medicine Battles Death

The Japanese launched their well-known raid on Urujia, and the number of victims reached 189; at that the United States rose up in an uproar and declared war on Japan. But when the number of the victims of cancer reached 17,000 in that same year, not a soul stirred in the House of Commons over the yearly toleration of this outrageous number, without anything being done to reduce it or any search made for its causes. Most of these victims are mothers of large or middle-sized families, who died stricken by the well-known disease of cancer of the womb.

In that year it was not possible to save those victims, or to do anything to change the situation; but the situation today differs greatly from what it was before, thanks to the useful discoveries modern science has reached concerning this disease, which has baffled medicine, or nearly so. In the years to come, science will be able to save the greater part of these wretched victims who go as a sacrifice to ignorance and fear — the fear that plays so great a part in the development of the disease of cancer.

Let us take an example — any woman among those 17,000 victims. For a short while she was sound of body, complaining of no pain, doing her daily work, untroubled by any fear of this disease, because she had not yet passed her fortieth year, and her doctor had told her that cases of cancer before that age are very rare. Would that this woman had had someone to tell her with certainty that cancer had begun forming in her womb some months before; that it now scarcely covered the head of a pin; that it would go on growing slowly, and that a like number of months would pass before the cancer could establish itself and put down its roots — and how easy it is to root it out in the course of those months, when its victim would be safe from it for the rest of her life...

But how is this woman to know what she is heading for, when she has felt no pain that would warrant consulting the doctor — and even if she did consult him, he would be unable, before another 12 months had passed, to see with his naked eye any trace of this disease... Fear first finds its way into this woman's heart when she sees, for the first time, her clothes stained with drops of blood at times other than her monthly period...

Yes, this woman is afraid, for she knows that these drops of blood may be the first signs of cancer of the womb; but she very often drives the thought of evil from her head, reassuring herself that the cause of these drops may be due to something else. And so she rarely goes to her doctor before the sight of these drops has recurred many times — by which time the roots of this malignant disease have taken hold, and branched out, and become difficult to root out, and her death has become the likelier outcome...

Among the causes that delay this woman from consulting the doctor is her striving to drive away the thought of ill; for she knows that of the women stricken with cancer of the womb, only a third escape. What she forgets is that this third are the women who are true to themselves and go to the doctor at the earliest possible stage in the course of this disease. The sooner she goes to him, the stronger her chances of recovery...

As for the common test for detecting this disease and confirming its presence, it is called the (biopsy) test, and it requires heavy expense and long time. For these reasons most doctors, even today, do not press their patients to undergo it, especially as it does not yield decisive results, but often errs... And so a long period of waiting passes, during which the disease has played its part and destroyed its victim, and there is no longer any hope of saving her...

The regrettable thing is that many women who to all appearances enjoy full health carry this disease while ignorant of the danger closing in on them. But there is fine good news for all ladies — good news of the outcome of a new discovery concerning cancer of the womb. It has become easy to verify its presence or its absence, and this costs neither money nor time nor effort... All there is to it is that a little of the fluid of the womb is drawn out by means of a glass tube fitted with rubber, and that this fluid is placed under the microscope, whereupon the microscopic cancer particles (cells) appear, floating in the fluid, even in the earliest stages of the disease. A simple surgical operation can then be performed which guarantees the rooting out of the disease before its roots branch and spread — and by this means a woman makes her life safe from her enemy and killer!...

The first results of this discovery appeared in the year 1943, when the presence of cancer particles was proven in the fluid drawn from the womb of a woman afflicted with this disease, even at its very first formation. Science proved a great victory and recorded a new conquest in the wide world of medicine. Tests were then made on a large number of healthy women, and the doctors marveled how in many of them cancer particles appeared in the fluid drawn from their wombs; the disease was tracked down in its first stages, and those women were completely cured. The strange thing is that when this simple test was offered to a body of women numbering over three thousand, the microscopic cancer particles were found in many who were enjoying full health — and many of them were under the age of forty, which is considered the threshold at which cancer begins to appear in women. The importance of this discovery lies in its simplicity, its speed, and its cheapness; for it has become possible for every woman to undergo this test yearly, as a precaution, to make sure of detecting the cancer particles in its first months or weeks, when the disease is the size of a pin's head, still floating on the membrane of the womb, its roots not yet fixed — roots that spread out after the first year of its formation.

The second benefit of this discovery is that it makes it easier to learn the cause of this disease, which remains to this day an obscure secret in the world of medicine; for when the disease is discovered in its first stages, learning its cause and tracing it become less difficult than they are now.