Conclusion From Cure to Treatments

Abstract

The disease of cancer began to be documented by the ancient Egyptians in the so-called Ebers, Smith, and Petrie papyri, all of which date back to approximately 1,600 BC (Thorwald 1962:48—55, 98—99). It was Hippocrates, however, who, circa 400 BC, completed the first advanced description of cancer. He also coined the concept, calling the process karkinos, Greek for“crab”or“crayfish,”to which he added the suffix— oma, Greek for“swelling,”giving birth to the name karkinoma or, in Latin,“cancer”(Cassileth 1983:363). Some 500 years later, the Greek Clarissimus Galen, the last great physician of the Antiquity who settled in Rome in 164 AD, took the study of cancer a step further by developing a comprehensive classification of 61 different types of cancer (Fisher & Hermann 1979:428).

There are no such things as incurables, there are only things for which man has not found a cure.

—Bernard Baruch (Gaither, Cavazos-Gaither, & Slocombe 1999:57)