William Morton's Arms Race Against Cancer

The term chemotherapy is defined as: “The treatment of disease by means of chemicals that have a specific toxic effect upon the disease-producing microorganisms that selectively destroy cancerous tissue” (Dictionary of Cultural Literacy). When chemotherapy was first developed at the beginning

From surgery to radium exposure to such extremes as radiation therapy, as doctors’ knowledge of the varying types of cancer, and the expansion of medical research regarding cancer has changed, so has the preferred method of treatment. Doctors and researchers dedicated to studying cancer have led to a greater understanding of cancer development; consequently the development of treatments and cures that are more effective, less harmful, have fewer side effects, and in some cases serve to prevent the spread of cancer.

Long times ago, even during the 19th century, scientist all over the world had started to find the cure for cancer, one of the most feared disease you can ever imagine, simply because you don’t know what the cause and how to turn it off. Cancer started

. Jettowyne, (The Compassionate Friends, 2011, November 4), stated, “Friends don’t want to say your child’s name, because they think it will make you feel bad”. Being open and asking or commenting on the child is essential in the healing process and showing support.

I agree it was smart to take action against her breast cancer quickly before it took her away just as her mother had. I'm glad she wrote about her fight against it and wants to encourage other women to seek help and make their own decision of what they want to do. After reading "Hopeful Glimmers in Long War on Cancer" there's still hope for people with cancer and by now there might be more information about it so there's more choices to make for

Doctors had been using radiation to destroy cancerous cells since the unfolding of X-rays and radium in the 1890s, but both techniques had their own issues. X-ray machines were complicated to make use of, and radium implanted near tumors. In addition, X-rays weren’t strong enough to be entirely effective, and as for both of them, they were quite expensive.

The cyclotron used the same concept that a circular particle accelerator used. The purpose of the accelerator to be shaped in a circular shape is to speed up the particles as they revolve around this path. When they revolve around this path they gain velocity and speed. The formula for velocity is displacement/ time. The amount of change that there is in the position of the particle affects the velocity of the particle. The formula of speed is distance over time. The speed transforms as the same time that the particles transform energies through the magnetic fields that they are interacting

The word cancer comes from the word Karkinos which is greek language. Physician hippocrates used this word to describe carcinoma tumors sometime between the periods 460-379 B.C. Although there were many accounts and evidence of cancer before, which were found in mummies in ancient Egypt during the period 1600 B.C. The oldest evidence of cancer was found in 1500 B.C in a tomb in egypt. Cancer treatment were non existence during those days. There were small palliative treatments which relieved pain and suffering temporarily. However we still use similar surgical treatment for surfaced tumors today that was used during that period. Early hippocrates also discovered that cancer returned after surgery. Cancer treatments has evolved tremendously

It is said that three in five Americans will develop the horrible disease called cancer. Any living thing on this planet has the possibility of developing this uncontrollable disease. This includes scientists, medical doctors, regulators, owners of drug companies, along with their loved ones, meaning that they aren’t immune to cancer (“Big”). Many people in our society claim that the medical industry, along with the government, is keeping the cure to cancers suppressed. In figure 2 we see a perfect example of how society sees the scientists and doctors involved. This conspiracy has been around for quite some time and it’s mostly because some believe that the cancer war is just one big fraud (Michael Higgins). Such a conspiracy, is very

In the 1940s, two Yale pharmacologists, Alfred Gilman and Louis Goodman, studied the beneficial effects of mustard agents in helping lymphoma. It was not first made to be a cancer treatment. They injected a type of mustard gas into a patient who had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They found that the patient's tumor masses had lessened after just a few weeks of treatment. Since then, Chemotherapy started to gain

Surgery is the oldest type of treatment for cancer. In its earlier use, surgery was not as successful as it is today. This was due to the difficulties involved with the anesthesias, excessive blood loss,

The word “cancer” first appeared in medical literature in 400BC during the time of Hippocrates as “karkinos”. Cancer was compared to a crab, which was denoted by its hardened back, its painful sting and its mobility. Another Greek word described cancer as “onkos” which represented the load born by cancer patients which is

The drugs that were used to cure either prostate cancer or leukemia were some options. In the early 1900s x-rays were discovered, and they thought that radiation could be used to kill tumor cells. However according to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of the pulitzer prize book “The Emperor of all Maladies” states, “But scientifically, cancer still remained a black box, a mysterious entity that was best cut away en bloc rather than treated by some deeper medical insight” (Mukherjee 23). Mukherjee was trying to say that cancer is still a mystery, also known as a “black box.” Doctors only used two strategies to cure cancer which are “excising the tumor surgically or incinerating it with radiation- a choice between the hot ray and the cold knife”

Breast cancer has been acknowledged for centuries, with records dating as far back as the ancient Egyptians, over 3500 years ago (1). However diagnosis, research and progress throughout history have been slow due to it being a matter of taboo and humiliation. In 1957 the idea of surgically removing the tumours was suggested by Henri Le Dran, introducing mastectomy to the 20th century; the first scientific step in acting against cancer. Radical mastectomy lengthened survival, however was often declined due to the disfigurement left behind. To overcome this, Bernard Fisher published results from ‘breast conserving’ surgery accompanied by radiation or chemotherapy, which were ‘just as effective’ as a radical mastectomy (1).

In 2007, it is predicted that almost 1.5 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States (Pickle et al., 2007). More than half of these cancer patients will undergo the use of radiation as a means for treating cancer at some point during the course of their disease (Perez and Brady, 1998). Cancer, a disease caused by an uncontrollable growth of abnormal cells, affects millions of people around the world. Radiotherapy is one of the well known various methods used to treat cancer, where high powered rays are aimed directly at the tumor from the outside of the body as external radiation or an instrument is surgically placed inside the body producing a result of internal radiation. Radiation is delivered to the cancerous regions of the body to damage and destroy the cells in that area, terminating the rapid growth and division of the cells. Radiation therapy has been used by medicine as a treatment for cancer from the beginning of the twentieth century, with its earliest beginnings coming from the discovery of x-rays in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. With the advancements in physics and computer programming, radiation had greatly evolved towards the end of the twentieth century and made the radiation treatment more effective. Radiation therapy is a curative treatment approach for cancer because it is successful in killing cancerous tumor cells and stop them from regenerating.