Cancer: Its Forgotten History by Lawrence Broxmeyer
Internist Lawrence Broxmeyer reviews a portion of cancer history too soon forgotten.
Online, December 5, 2010 (Newswire.com) - When Virginia Livingston was a student at Bellevue Medical College her pathology teacher mentioned, rather disparagingly, that there was a woman pathologist at Cornell who thought Hodgkin's disease (a form of glandular cancer) was caused by avian tuberculosis. This lady had published, but no one had confirmed her findings. Afterwards, Livingston compared slides of both. In Hodgkin's, the large multinucleated giant cells were called Reed-Sternberg cells. They were similar to the giant cells of tuberculosis, which formed to engulf the tubercle bacilli. Livingston stored away in her memory that this lady pathologist was probably right, but she would have a difficult time in gaining acceptance.
By 1931, Pathologist Elsie L'Esperance was seeing 'acid fast' tuberculosis-like bacteria riddling her Hodgkin's cancer tissue samples. And that germ, once injected into guinea pigs, caused them to come down with Hodgkin's too, fulfilling Koch's postulates. L'Esperance brought her stained slides to former teacher and prominent Cornell cancer pathologist James Ewing. Ewing initially confirmed that her tissue slides were indeed Hodgkin's. But when he found out that her slides came through guinea pig inoculation of the avian (fowl) tuberculosis she had found in humans with Hodgkin's, Ewing, visibly upset, said that the slides then could not be cancer.
It betrayed his checkered history of high-placed medical politician. In 1907, you could have approached Dr. James Ewing about a cancer germ, and he would have embraced you over it. At that time, both for he and the rest of the nations medical authorities, it was not a question of whether cancer was caused by a germ, but which one. Was not it Ewing, at one time, who had proclaimed that tuberculosis followed Hodgkin's cancer "like a shadow"?
But shortly after, James Ewing, "the Father of Oncology", sent a sword thru the heart of an infectious cause of cancer with "Neoplastic Diseases", becoming an ambitious zealot for radiation therapy with the directorship of what would one day be called Sloan-Kettering squarely on his mind. His entry lay in prominent philanthropist James Douglas. A vote for Ewing, Douglas knew, was a vote for continued radiation and James Douglas began sizeable uranium extraction operations from Colorado mines thru his company, Phelps Dodge, Incorporated.
Soon Sloan became known as a radium hospital and went from an institution with a census of less than 15% cancer patients, separated by partition, lest their disease spread to others, to a veritable cancer center. But the very history of radiation revealed its flaws, and by the early 1900s nearly 100 cases of leukemia were documented in radium recipients and not long thereafter it was determined that approximately 100 radiologists had contracted that cancer in the same way.
Still, Ewing, by now an Honorary Member of the American Radium Society, persisted.
Elise L'Esperance was anything but alone in linking Hodgkin's to a germ called Avium or fowl tuberculosis. Historically Sternberg himself, discoverer of Hodgkin's trade-mark Reed-Sternberg cell, believed Hodgkin's was caused by tuberculosis. Both Fraenkel and Much held, as L'Esperance, that it was caused by a peculiar form of tuberculosis, such as Avium or Fowl tuberculosis, and of all the cancers, debate over the infectious cause of Hodgkin's waxed the hottest.
But, according to Lawrence Broxmeyer, L'Esperance wasn't alone.
"Our (cancer) cultures were scrutinized over and over again. Strains were sent to many laboratories for identification. None could really classify them. They were something unknown. They had many forms but they always grew up again to be the same thing no matter how they were cultured. They resembled the mycobacteria more than anything else. The tubercle bacillus is a mycobacterium or fungoid bacillus." -Virginia Livingston, 1972
Virginia Wuerthele-Caspe Livingston was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania and went on to obtain impeccable credentials. Graduating from Vassar, she received her M.D. from N.Y.U.. In time Virginia Livingston went specifically after breast cancer. Thirty sterile cancerous breasts were transported from operating room to lab. Cancers were isolated from each breast and when axillary tissue from under the arm was supplied, the cancerous portion was cut from this too. Livingston and Jackson found the cancer germ everywhere, and in the case of underarm glands, even when the pathology report was negative, the cancer microorganism surfaced.
To Read more regarding Lawence Broxmeyer's Cancer: A Historical Perspective as well as the peer-reviewed article it was based upon, go to: