aken.[1] Cancer of the stomach in its final stages does not
present insuperable difficulties in way of diagnosis, but the
death-rate increased for men about 40 per cent. in fifteen years; and
although some of this increase may be due to more careful
discrimination between cases of malignant disease affecting the liver,
yet this explanation cannot account for the increase when both organs
are considered together. The subject is worthy of careful and
extended investigation, but even a cursory examination of the facts
now available indicate a real increase in the death-rate from cancer
in England, and probably in every other civilized country in the
world.

[1] "During fourteen years ... the mortality from mammary cancer has
increased by about 29 per cent., NOTWITHSTANDING LIVES SAVED BY
IMPROVED METHODS OF OPERATION."--Registrar-General's Report for 1910,
p. 69.

But all these phenomena are of secondary importance compared with the
great problem of medical science--the yet undiscovered cause of
malignant disease. During recent years the study of cancer has been
conducted with scientific enthusiasm in many laboratories. Vast sums
of money have been given, in the hope that these studies may one day
lead to the discovery of a cure. One whom I knew in his youth became
the heir of great wealth; lived to see one whom he loved perish from
the disease; was struck down himself, and dying, left a fortune for
the purpose of promoting research concerning cancer. And yet to-day
the problem, as attacked in the various laboratories of Europe and
America, is apparently as far from solution as it was forty years
ago. Sir Henry Butlin, ex-President of the Royal College of Surgeons,
England, is said to have operated on as many cases of cancer as any
surgeon of his day. Yet, speaking in October, 1911, he said:

"I have been associated with the Imperial Cancer Research and in touch
with its staff from the foundation of the Research, and have been a
member of the publication committee of all its scientific reports. IT
HAS DONE NOTHING ON THE LINES IN WHICH OBSERVATION HAS BEEN SO
USEFUL. It has not unfolded the life-history of a single variety of
cancer, so that we can base our operations on the information. It has
not even discovered whether spontaneous cancer of a particular part of
the body in the rat or mouse runs a similar course to spontaneous
cancer of the same part of the body in the human subject. These
problems are not