Cancer

 Page 18: “... in 1865 there was published in London interesting volume on The Antecedents of Cancer by Charles H. Moore ... In brief, he connects the progress of civilization with the increase of cancer, which has remained an incontestable theory to the present day.” 

"Before Europeans came, Bishop Reeve thought, his Athapaskans must have been among the healthiest peoples in the world. But many of them died young nevertheless. At childbirth the mortality was high, especially for babies but also for mothers. Accidents were many in childhood and youth, indeed throughout life. Though famines came seldom, the wiping out of small groups by starvation was frequent. Murders occurred, but not as often as among whites. Women who survived the childbirth period, and their male contemporaries, would more likely die from old age than from disease.

The problem of whether old age descended upon Indians sooner or later than upon whites, the bishop thought, could be discussed only with regard to probabilities, since undisputed facts were hard to come by. He had read in the books of some explorers, and in some Hudson's Bay Company reports from early traders, that old age was supposed to afflict the native prematurely. But himself he was unable to see how those writers could have found this out, even if their interpreters were of the best. For the very idea of counting years, to keep track of a person's age, was foreign to native thinking and had been brought into the Athapaska country by these same Europeans. The only fact that a Mackenzie River Indian could know about anybody's age, and the only thing he could have told anybody, was which of his neighbors were older than others.

By the time he discoursed with us in 1906, Bishop Reeve had been pondering matters of northern Canadian native health and longevity for thirty-seven years, starting in 1869. During the scores of hours in which the bishop shared his knowledge and thinking with us, I gradually came to understand how he classified the diseases and derangements which he believed were derived from Europe and which he chiefly blamed for changing the Athapaskans from healthy to sickly, and for reducing the population of the northern third of our continent from several millions to fewer than one hundred thousand. His grouping of these presumed imports seemed to be:

1. Cataclysmic germ afflictions that swept away the robust and the weak indiscriminately.

2. Insidious germ infections to which the strong were resistant.

3. Sicknesses which probably were not due to a germ freshly introduced by Europeans but which likely were caused by a deleterious way of life introduced from Europe.

Diseases of Europeanization. These included a dozen maladies such as cancer, rickets, scurvy, and tooth decay. Their recent appearance among the Athapaskans was charged by the bishop to the introduction of such foods as bread and sugar, and to such new food-handling methods as the preservation of meats with salt and the overcooking of fresh foods."

Bishop Reeve seemed a little doubtful about the heroic Marsh technique when it was used against a germ disease like tuberculosis. But against another group of ills he felt sure the native life was a panacea, preventing those derangements which he believed to be caused by eating the wrong foods or by not eating the right ones. This baker’s dozen or so of diseases he thought nutritional. I consider his full list farther on, along with some additions contributed by Alaskan and Canadian medical missionaries. I shall now select three from this lot, because in 1906 everybody along the Mackenzie River system was talking about them, as part of what they had to say about the Klondike Gold Rush.

Stefansson 1960

After having been acting president of the University of California through its first year, LeConte reverted to a mere professorship, and to writing (and perhaps lecturing?) upon the incidence of cancer. In his third San Francisco year he published, through the local Western Lancet, for March 1872, an article in which he again put forward “Tanchouism,” this time in connection with an appeal for more frontier information bearing upon the doctrine. This article is “Vital Statistics: Illustrated by the Laws of Mortality from Cancer.”

Presumably this second article, published in between LeConte's two presidencies of the university, was the one which — directly or through notice in other medical journals — reached Dr. Knight and thus may have initiated the Leavitt frontier search for malignant disease.

 Page 25: “In 1882, Dr. W. Mitchell Banks ... published in Edinburgh an important paper ... [which includes] ‘Cancer is on the increase in this country. Is it possible that this is coincident with our full habit of living, as a people?’” 

Apart from that problematic special effectiveness, still more effective in supporting Tanchouism was no doubt LeConte's further return to the charge, in 1888. By then he had been re-elected president of the University of California; and now his medium of publication was the Tenth Biennial Report of the California State Board of Health (Sacramento). On page 181 of the report, President Le Conte uses almost the same words he had used forty-two years before as a young doctor in Georgia: “It is the opinion of M. Tanchou that cancer, like insanity, increases in a direct ratio to the civilization of the country and of the people ...”

On page 182 of the Board of Health report there is a mixture of the old wording and a new, and there are new statistics: “Perhaps the habit of making necroscopic examinations may be more common in the French metropolis than it is in England, and thus a greater number of internal cancers may be detected and registered. But it is hardly reasonable to suppose that the disparity growing out of this circumstance would amount to the enormous proportion of 4 to 1.

“In view of M. Tanchou's idea, that the mortality from cancer is in direct ratio to the intensity of human civilization, it may be to some extent consolatory to the inhabitants of England to discover that their recent mortuary records, from 1860 to 1867, indicate a very remarkable increase in the death rate from this disease.”