History of cancer
In 2016, a 1.7 million year old osteosarcoma was reported by Dr Edward John Odes (a doctoral student in Anatomical Sciences from the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, South Africa) and colleagues, representing the oldest documented malignant hominin cancer.
In a study by the University of Manchester, only one case was found "in the investigation of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, with few references to cancer in literary evidence.
[3] This comes from the appearance of the cut surface of a solid malignant tumour, with "the veins stretched on all sides as the animal the crab has its feet, whence it derives its name".
[4] Since it was against Greek tradition to open the body, Hippocrates only described and made drawings of outwardly visible tumours on the skin, nose, and breasts.
The German professor Wilhelm Fabry believed that breast cancer was caused by a milk clot in a mammary duct.
The Dutch professor Francois de la Boe Sylvius, a follower of Descartes, believed that all disease was the outcome of chemical processes, and that acidic lymph fluid was the cause of cancer.
With the widespread use of the microscope in the 18th century, it was discovered that the 'cancer poison' eventually spreads from the primary tumour through the lymph nodes to other sites ("metastasis").
The genetic basis of cancer was recognised in 1902 by the German zoologist Theodor Boveri, professor of zoology at Munich and later in Würzburg.
Richard Doll left the London Medical Research Centre (MRC), to start the Oxford unit for Cancer epidemiology in 1968.
Over the past 50 years, great efforts have been spent on gathering data across medical practice, hospital, provincial, state, and even country boundaries to study the interdependence of environmental and cultural factors on cancer incidence.
Cancer patient treatment and studies were restricted to individual physicians' practices until World War II when medical research centres discovered that there were large international differences in disease incidence.
The Japanese medical community observed that the bone marrow of victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was completely destroyed.
[14] In 1973, cancer research led to a Cold War incident,[15] where co-operative samples of reported oncoviruses were discovered to be contaminated by HeLa.
[16] From 1971 to 2007 the United States invested over $200 billion on cancer research; that total includes funding from public and private sectors and foundations.
[17] Despite this substantial investment, the country saw just a five percent decrease in the cancer death rate (adjusting for size and age of the population) between 1950 and 2005.
