Cancer in the past

Cancertherapy throughout history.

The First one to write detailed about cancer tumours is Hippocrates, the Greek doctor and founder of Western medical science. He treats tumours with ointments and by removing them surgically.

He distinguishes several types, depending on the shape he calls them either Karkinos (Lobster) and Karkinoma (Lobster tumour). In Latin, the translation of lobster is cancer.

Morbid

In the second century a.d. Galenus from Pergamon (Little-Asia) works out the theory of body fluids. His theory is considered right for about a millennium. According to this scientist tumours are to blame to a surplus of black bile, that hardens in parts of body parts like lips, tongue and breasts.  He prescribes laxatives to solve the hardened bile. If that doesn’t decrease the size of the tumour, he cuts them away.

Until the end of the Middle Ages the cures still are: Special diets, laxatives, rubbing ointments onto the skin of the patient, and cutting away the tumours. The way cancer eventually leads to death remains unclear. The adoptive truth is that the ‘cancer poison’ spreads through the body.

Modern times

From the renaissance on, the knowledge about internal tumours, thanks to the anatomical research on bodies, has grown. They have discovered the lymphatic system. In the seventeenth century a.d. people start to understand that cancer can spread along the lymphatic vessels through the entire body. For a while the generally accepted truth is that this disease is infectious. Patients are banned from hospitals because of fear of an epidemic.

In the nineteenth century the theory of body fluids has finally been proven wrong. Scientists start to seek for the cause of the disease by a cell which is out of order. In the twentieth century it’s generally accepted that the cause of cancer is the damaging of the DNA of the cells.

The beginning of chemotherapy

Originally the term ‘chemotherapy’ was used for every cure of disease that uses chemicals.

After that the definition was narrowed to medicines that can kill cells, and other connected life forms such as bacteria. In the medical world they sometimes use the word to define antibiotics. But usually they mean the treatment of cancer with chemical medicines. Those medicines are also known as cytostatics. These cytostastics stop the growth of cancer cells or destroy them.

dichloroethyl sulphide

The history of chemotherapy began during WW II. The American doctor Cornelius Packard Rhoads was back then living in Bari, where the allies used the harbour for their provisioning. During the night of the 3rd of December in 1943 the Germans bombed the port. Sixteen ships were sunk. One of them was the Liberty. That ship is carrying a top secret load of 100 barrels of mustard gas, destined for warfare. The barrels started leaking. Rhoads treats a great deal of the more than 600 of the passengers and the crew. He notices that the level of white blood cells has largely decreased, while the rest of their tissue seems untouched. He thinks that this characteristic may be useful for the treatment of cancers that are attended with a surplus of white blood cells like leukaemia. In the United States of America pharmacologists Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman ascertained that mustard gas influenced rapidly separating cells.
After 1946 these findings were published, because before 1946 they were still kept secret. The first chemotherapy was developed with mustard gas. Afterwards they went on with searching to similar substances. Family of these alkaline chemotherapeutics are still used nowadays.

Follicle Acid

Shortly after WWII there comes a second major breakthrough. Scientists were quite capriciously testing all sorts of substances on their effectiveness against cancer, and from the 1950’s on they completely switch their way of working. They base their conclusions on existing knowledge about mechanisms which are the cause of cancer, by determining on forehand which building blocks of the DNA of the cancer cell they want to hit.  After they’ve found it, they search the substance which is identical to that building block and send this Trojan horse into the cancer cell. After this cell is taken up by the cancer cell it destroys its DNA. This cathegory of chemotherapeutics is called the antimetabolites.

Taxus

In the following years scientists searched on into this direction, but with a new target: finding products with less adverse effects. End 1970’s 25 usable substances existed. The research took place on global scale, but it are mostly American companies that commercialize the medicine.

Mid 1980’s the taxans were invented, like Taxol and Taxotere. Taxol is a natural product from the yew tree. Originally it has to be taken out of the tree itself, but there was barely enough for research, because the yew tree is the slowest growing tree on earth. End 1980’s scientists found out how to synthetisized Taxol.