The proclivity of women to cancerous diseases and to certain benign tumours : being the substance of a lecture delivered at the Cancer Hospital on February 6, 1891 : with appendix on heredity as a cause of cancer / by Herbert Snow.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The proclivity of women to cancerous diseases and to certain benign tumours : being the substance of a lecture delivered at the Cancer Hospital on February 6, 1891 : with appendix on heredity as a cause of cancer / by Herbert Snow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    The facts are I think, readily intelligible when we reflect upon : {a) The greater attention to cleanliness, and to their personal appearance in general, which characterises women, as contrasted with men. {b) The comparatively small proclivity of women to alcohol, particularly in the concentrated form of spirits. And with this, their abstinence in this country, from the practice of smoking. On the first of these I need lay no great stress ; it being for my present purpose sufficient to indicate how it operates by inducing an early removal of the familiar exciting causes which result in epithelioma, —in the mouth, irritating conditions of the teeth,— on the face, unsightly warts,—and so forth. The second however brings me to one of the key-notes of this present paper; a principle briefly summed up in the maxim : Fztnctional disorder or dei^angement is apt to generate organic disease. In a lecture previously delivered here, and to which in view of the exigencies of time I must venture to refer you ; ^ I showed the one essential element in all cancer-growth to be an abnormal cell-proliferation; due to reversion, to a return of the primitive ele- ments of the various tissues to an original amcebi- form condition, in which, every single cell is to all intents and purposes, a quasi-parasitic independent organism. I cannot now quote the evidence in favour