Clay Pipes and Cancer.

Manawatu Herald, 23 July 1903, Page 3

Clay Pipes and Cancer.

The Practitioner for May is a special number, and is devoted to malignant diseases of the mouth Sir Thornley Stoker, writing on ‘Cancer on the Lips,’ says: • The use of the pipe is the exciting cause of lip cancer in almost every case. The disease is rarely found in non-smokers. The cases of epithelioma of the lips which I have seen in women were all m peasants who smoked. The great bulk of the cases of this class in the Richmond Hospital come from the more remote ..parts of Ireland In these districts the short, hot clay pipe is still smoked ; while m Dublin. and in regions closer to the city where the briar-root pipe is m use, cancer of the Ups is not nearly so common. If further evidence be necessary in this direction it may be, found in the fact that patmn.s can nearly always tell you that the cancer has appeared on the side on which they use their pipes. Sir Thornley Stoker notes the freedom of women from cancer on the lip. He has operated on over 360 oIU, «d tas maaj and all were males except three These three were West of Ireland peasants. who smoked assiduously. -spite-of the-great attentioa^tha has been paid to the-subject causation of inaligaant diHeaW m virnl ofthfa»la d 7i

according to the £ Practitioner,’ is still shrouded in absolute mystery. Great hopes were at first built on the theory that some form of parasite might be found to be the maleficent agent at work, but at present the discovery of such an organism seems as far off as ever. In the days when bacteria were a novelty, and disease after disease was found to, be associated with these minute fungi, several kinds of microbe were successively hailed as the germs of eancer, but each in turn proved to bo only a casual inhabitant of malignant growths. Finally, the yeast fungi have been claimed as the true excitants of cancer, but these again,* we are told, are probably only accidentally present in the tumors.