Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/13

Rh to trace the life-history of the living cell, and still more attempt to influence the progress of its nutrition, its growth, even its very nature perhaps, by stimulant or inhibitant, as is the aim, I take it, of the various grafting or tincturing processes by serum now in vogue.

Again, we knew, or thought we knew, that seats I of worry were prone to take on malignant growth; that the well-known nag of clay pipe, of irritating smoke, of soot, was associated with epithelioma; we knew, or thought we knew, that simple and malignant tumours were liable to be found side by side in the same body—a point that I have repeatedly demonstrated in the dead-house, and that seems to me to cast a doubt upon the claim still maintained, I do not say wrongly so, that malignancy is something altogether apart from ordinary growth. But it was surmised by some from what we saw that a spermatic or perhaps graft-like influence was at work in the one group that was not to be seen in the other, and that, so it seemed to me, this influence gradually communicated itself to the cell structures in the neighbourhood, until they ultimately shared in the process, and fraternized with the ill-tutored agitator.

In this one respect, I may say in passing, the opinion then hazarded is not in accord with more recent work, which, on the contrary, goes to show that malignancy, even to its latest stage, is self-ordered and self-centred, and does not give a pattern to the surrounding elements. And yet, on the other hand, there is a suggestion of some more intimate relationship between the invaders and invaded, even in our latest information, for it would seem that the