Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells grow uncontrollably. It is also the second leading cause of death in the world. In spite of its rather simple definition and high prevalence, people in history haven’t always understood cancer or how to treat it.
Ancient Egypt
The oldest description of cancer can be found in an ancient Egyptian papyrus named after one of its past owners, egyptologist Edwin Smith. The Edwin Smith papyrus is approximately 5,000 years old and served as a convenient copy of an ancient textbook. It describes eight cases of what it calls “ulcers” located in the breast. Unfortunately, though it is clear that an early effort was made to research the condition, the document states that the diseased breasts were untreatable.
Ancient Greece
The Egyptians were obviously interested in cancer but the condition was not given a name, or at least not the name we use to describe it today. That credit belongs to the ancient Greeks who would call a tumor a “karkinos” or “karkinoma”. Greek physicians in the 4th century B.C. believed that tumors that were not breaking through the skin were untreatable. Though they did have some operations available to them that could treat more visible cases of cancer, tumors within the armpits and some other areas were seen as more difficult to treat.
Early Modern England
During the early modern period in England, cancer was being described as “‘the most terrible of all the evils…’” The people of this time most definitely had experiences with this “evil.” However, it is possible that this attitude when compared to those of the ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians was due to the fact that, just a few hundred years before, between 9 and 14 percent of adults were dying with cancer, if not because of cancer.
Victorian Era England
Some hundred or so years later, attitudes towards cancer had not changed very much. This time it was perhaps because many had expected that a cure for cancer would have been discovered by then. This long hoped for cure, unfortunately, still did not exist. Surgeons were reluctant to perform operations on those who had been diagnosed due to the fact that these procedures were frequently deadly. Even as the years went on, rates of death from surgeries to remove cancer-ridden uteruses were at around ten percent.
Modern Day
Though a universal cure for cancer is still a ways off, there are many more options for cancer patients now. These options include chemotherapy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, stem cell transplants, and surgery. More and better options have certainly improved people’s chances of surviving cancer with the ten-year relative survival rate for non-invasive metastatic breast cancer being around 85 percent. A lot of progress has been made since the days of those “untreatable breast ulcers.”
