LIFE-SAVING PISTOL

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 306, 20 September 1921, Page 5

LIFE-SAVING PISTOL

SHOOTING RAYS AT CANCER. . The so-called new cure for cancer was much discussed privately and a, little discussed in a public lecture at tho final sessions of the British Medical Association at Newcastle-on-Tyne, says the “Daily Mail.” , The real nature of the advance is curious—it is rather an invention than a discovery. For some time specialists have hoped that they co.uld cure cancer if they could or, as it were, certain rays into the particular part of the body and persuade tho affected tissues to absorb them almost as a piece of sugar absorbs water. The chief difficulty was to find, so to speak, a barrel or tubo capable of shooting these penetrative rays. Tho rays' were so powerful that they bombarded the tubo to pieces and hindered its shooting powers. This trouble has been largely overcome. A tube—one may call it a gun or cannon—has been made which can shoot these immensely powerful rays into the body without itself collapsing under what is now technically called tho “bombardment.”

Surgeons and doctors, in short, have now in their hands a beueficient lifesaving pistol of the sort that science has been seeking.

Ono great difficulty has been overcome, bufTt may be given as tho general medical view that it is too early to sny whether the affected tissues will sufficiently absorb the beneficent stream of “bullets,” or active rays, to secure a complete cure. Tho position is that for the first timo science is enabled fully to apply a treatment from which much has been hoped. Cancer is still very mysterious, A reader Of one of the papers in tho Section of Radiology, where tho new treatment was touched on, told of h. pii limit of his, a woman, who had kept hciw’lf alive for seven years simply by saying she would not die of her cancer. She lived, as she put it, for seven yours mi her optimism. Cancer is myntoriouw, mid tho now treatment not yet proved, but, as he concluded, “in a year’s time wo hope to ktivw a good deal,"