Word: cancered
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Perhaps Germany's Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, compelled the publication of a report in Berlin newspapers last week that a Nazi anatomist had discovered the precise cause of cancer. At least that is what scientists who respect Wilhelm von Bremer of Berlin's State Biological Institute would like to believe...
According to Dr. von Bremer, cancer comes from a germ which skulks inside red blood cells. Berlin papers printed pictures of such cancerigenic germs, which Dr. von Bremer claimed to have separated from their hosts. He has even bred the germs and with their descendants created cancers in perfectly healthy creatures. And if he spoke the truth he has cured cancers medically rather than surgically...
Belief No. 1: the blood of elderly people, who are prone to develop cancer, is more alkaline than the blood of cancer-resisting youth. Belief No. 2: as a cancer fades under ministrations of radium or x-rays, the elderly patient's blood decreases in alkalinity, gains in acidity. Many a researcher has, without any definite success, attempted to attack cancer by injecting acids into the blood to reduce its alkalinity. Dr. von Bremer claimed complete success for this method as a means of killing off his "cancer germs...
Explosions of derision and disbelief immediatety followed publication of Dr. von Bremer's ideas in the U. S. Cockroaches have been blamed for causing cancer by no less a person than Nobel Prizewinner Johannes Fibiger of Denmark. Many a lesser light has offered a variant of the germ theory. Subtle irritants, chemical or mechanical, have been suggested. Likewise cancer has been attributed to nervous strain, city life, life itself, breakdown of individual body cells, degeneracy of the entire constitution...
...Cures" have been just as multitudinous: caustics, serums, chemicals, hormones. But the fact remains that only by surgery, radium or x-ray does any reputable physician today treat cancer with any hope of success...