TREATMENT OF CANCER

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 91, 8 December 1931, Page 7

TREATMENT OF CANCER

ADVANCE OF SURGERY USE OF SURGICAL KNIVES GIYES WAY TO RADltJM CURES WITHOUT MUTILATION A new era in the treatment of cancer in which as far as possible the use of the knife will be avoided and mueh more extensive use will be made of agents such as radium and X-rays to effect cures without mutilation was predicted by the president of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (Sir Henry Newland) when delivering the Halford oration at the Australian Institute of _ Anatomy at Canberra recently. The oration, whieh "vyas founded by the family of the late Professor G. B . Halford, who established the first medical school in the Southern Hemisphere, that at Melbourne, is given annually. Sir Henry Newland took as his subjeet "Surgery in Australia: Some Con- __ trasts and Comparisons." He pointed out that in Australia the most modern surgical methods and the rude surgery of the stone age were practised simultaneously. When a man was shot through the heart, this, to the lay mind, meant that he was as good as dead. Yet surgery had so advanced that the modern conical bullet had been removed from both the right and the left heart cavities and the patients had recovered. Similarly brilliant results had been obtained in _ lung surgery. The surgeon's knife, an electrieal one, had also intruded into the deepest recesses of the human brain. The president of the Royal College of Surgeons in England (Lord Moynihan), continued Sir Henry Newland, had expressed the opinion that modern surgery had reached its limits. With much of that he agreed, but it seemed too much to expect that surgical craft and science would fail to make the advances in the future that they had made already. Unforeseen technical advances in the eollateral sciences could often be adopted for use in surgery. The electric loop, for instance, had made „ possible the removal of certain brain tumours which a f ew years previously had been considered inoperable. However, the present tendency to restrict the extent of surgical intervention was good, for the safety and ease with which the surgeon had learned i to remove organs, or large portions of them, had sometimes led to the adoption of too radical an outlook. Sir Henry Newland said that greater attention should be paid to diseases in their early stages. The science and art of surgery should be based on a sound foundation of anatomy and physiology. The future surgical treatment of cancer would not be by the old and mutilating methods of the knife. Radium and the deep Xray were the chief weapons in the attack on the stronghold of cancer. In those inner recesses of the body - where it had been foretold that the ' knife could never enter, the skilful hand of the surgeon entrenched ; radium. To-day, thanks to radium, cures came without mutilation, and man remained as he had been created.