fourth century BC, was the 18th successor of Aesculapius as Master of the Greek Medical School. He was the first to use the words “cancer” and “carcinoma” (in Greek, Karkinos and Karkinoma), but he believed that this pathology attacked the human body from outside, penetrating through the skin and infiltrating soft tissues and internal organs. Hippocrates had direct experience only of external tumors, because in the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations corpses could not be utilized for medical anatomical studies. The anatomy described by Galen in his famous books was the anatomy of the monkey, which was considered not different from human anatomy. The prohibition of the examination of human corpses was confirmed and maintained by the Catholic Church for at least 10 centuries, including the Middle Ages. Until then all diseases, according to Hippocratic theory, were caused by the absorption of black bile from the bowel into the blood, and were therefore cured by purging, enemas, and blood-lettings. At the end of the first millennium AD, a possible description of a gastric cancer could be read in Avicenna’s Medical Encyclopaedia. Avicenna was the most eminent exponent of Arabic medicine. In the eleventh century his encyclopedia included all the medical knowledge of the time from both Greek and Islamic civilizations, but it did not differ in any important respects from the Hippocratic bioclinical theory. With the Renaissance, medieval knowledge radically changed, and in the eighteenth century, cancer-origin theories were modified. In 1774 the thesis of Doctor Peyrile, entitled “Dissertatio Accademica de Cancro,” was published at the Academy of Lyon, and this may represent the origin of the modern oncological era. Despite this, in the eighteenth century, gastric cancers were unknown because benign and malignant gastric ulcers were only described later by J. Cruveilhier, in 1835. This explains the historical mystery about the death of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821 (Fig. 1). Eugenio Santoro Department of Oncologic Surgery, Division of Digestive Surgery and Liver Transplantation Regina Elena Cancer Institute
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Dec 12, 2005
David Cade + 1
Open Access