To this we answered in our comments on the interview:  “If the little knife of the beauty doctor causes cancer, what about the big knife of the surgeon?”

In point of fact, our office records show that a large percentage of malignant growths are the direct result of surgical operations.

Cancer Not a Local, But a Constitutional Disease

For many years I have been teaching in my lectures and writings as well as in private advice to patients that cancer is a constitutional disease; that it is rooted in every drop of blood in the body; that it is caused by the presence of certain disease taints or of food and drug poisons in the system; that these poisons irritate and stimulate the cells in a certain locality and cause their abnormal multiplication or proliferation in the forms of benign or malignant tumors.

I also claim that meat eating has much to do with the causation of cancer.

Certain discoveries by Dr. H. C. Ross of London, England, confirm my claims that cancer is not at all of local and accidental origin, but that it is constitutional, and that it may be caused by the gradual accumulation in the system of certain poisons which form in decaying animal matter.

One day, while experimenting in his laboratory, Dr. Ross brought white blood cells or leucocytes into contact with a certain aniline dye on the slide of a microscope and noticed that they began at once to multiply by cell division (proliferation).  This was the first time that cell proliferation had been observed by the human eye while the cells were separated from their parent organism.

Dr. Ross realized that he had made an important discovery and continued his experiments under the microscope in order to find out what other substances would cause cell multiplication.  He found that certain xanthines and albuminoids derived from decaying animal matter were the most effective for this purpose and induced more rapid cell proliferation than any other substances he was able to procure.

Dr. Ross obtained these “alkaloids of putrefaction,” as he called them, from blood which had been allowed to putrefy in a warm place.  He found that albuminoids derived from decaying vegetable substances did not have the same effect.

His discoveries led him to believe that the alkaloids of putrefaction produced in a cut or wound by the decaying of dead blood and tissue cells are the cause of the rapid multiplication of the neighboring live cells, which gradually fill the wound with new tissues.

Thus, for the first time in the history of medicine, a rational explanation of Nature’s methods for repairing injured tissues has been advanced.

Dr. Ross applied his theory still farther to the causation of benign and malignant growths, reasoning that the alkaloids of putrefaction produced in or attracted to a certain part of the body by some local irritation are the cause of the rapid, abnormal multiplication of cells in tumor formations.