Ancient and medieval chemotherapy for cancer.

Abstract

N 1916 DR. WILLIAM S. STONE, who became the director for cancer research at New York Memorial Hospital, addressed his colleagues about cancer. Both his own and his father's generation, he explained, treated cancer mostly by surgery; chemical treatments had been virtually abandoned long before. His argument calling for reexamination of the issue was largely historical, based on the observation that classical and early medieval treatment of the disease . . . almost invariably consist[ed] of arsenic, zinc, or the alkaline caustics. The historical testimony ought to be presumption, he implied, that chemical agents had some beneficial results, even though in his age there had been, in his words, unqualified condemnation of them.1 Stone's exhortation did not usher in a second age of for cancer, however. That age can perhaps be dated to 1938, when A. P. Dustin published his report about the antimitotic properties of colchicine, found in Colchicum autumnale L. C. Gordon Zubrod would date modern cancer chemotherapy to about 1935, with the investigation of the effect of bacterial toxins on human sarcomas. Others argue that the true beginning of modern cancer chemotherapy was in World War II, with the research on nitrogen mustards, but, because of security, the results were not published until after the war. Finally, a few note that the experiments by Paul Ehrlich in 1908 on transplantable tumors in rodents anticipated modern chemotherapy.2 No one, however, disputes that