Have Operations Failed to Cure?—­Very few persons die from operations performed by skilled surgeons for the removal of cancer.  Where cancer operation is done by experienced surgeons the fatality in America for the past fourteen years is less than one case out of a hundred, or in other words ninety-nine persons out of a hundred survive operation for cancer.  Many persons have died from the return of the cancerous growth even after operation by a skilled surgeon, and this fact has led many persons to believe that operation for cancer is, therefore, unsuccessful, that it does not cure.  This is not the fact.  It is true that cancer often returns after operation, and that this method does not always effect a permanent cure; but it is not true that operations are, therefore, useless.  The reason that operations do not remove cancers permanently in a great number of cases is that such cases do not submit to operation soon enough.  The majority of persons suffering from cancer seek surgical aid too late.  If a house is on fire and one refuses to turn in an alarm until the fire has spread from cellar to garret, neither blame nor disparagement must be placed upon the fire department if it failed to save the burning house.  So with cancer; if the public refuses or neglects to operate for cancer at the time when it can be eradicated, the public cannot censure or belittle surgery.  A cancer is like a green and ripe thistle.  Pull up the green thistle and you have gotten rid of it.  But if you wait until the thistle is ripe, and the winds have blown away the seeds, there is no use of pulling up that thistle.  Early operations are successful.  Late ones are not.

No reliable surgeon claims to save his patient or cure him of cancer if the disease be in an advanced stage.  But experienced surgeons do recognize the fact that cancer in its early stage can be permanently removed and a permanent cure can be effected by surgical operation.  No other means of permanent cure are known.

[Constitutional diseases 333]

Caustic pastes applied to cancerous growths or sera, are sometimes successful in obliterating the cancer for a time; but they are not reliable for effecting enduring cures, and usually are merely palliative, The fact that a cancer does not return for three years after removal is not sure proof that it will not return; the return of a cancerous growth depends upon its state of development and other conditions at the time of removal from the cancer.  In Johns Hopkins’ Hospital forty-seven per cent of all patients with cancers of the breast operated upon remained well for three years or more, and seventy-five per cent of this forty-seven per cent were cured, being in the most favorable condition for cure at the time of the operation.  But where conditions are not favorable at the time of the operation, many patients have a return of the cancer even after the three years of apparent cure have elapsed.