Cancer in History

SelenaWolf

As an historian and archivist for a cemetery, I remain fascinated by Cause of Death in history, especially cancer.  These articles, I have found interesting and argue well against the idea that "cancer is a modern disease".  However, there is some evidence that posits that our modern lifestyles make us more prone to cancer.  So... part of life or lifestyle?  Thoughts anyone?

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2010/10/14/claims-that-cancer-is-only-a-%E2%80%98modern-man-made-disease%E2%80%99-are-false-and-misleading/

http://www.news-medical.net/health/Cancer-History.aspx

http://www.cancervic.org.au/about-cancer/cancer-and-children/for-schools/timeline-cancer-history

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/16-history-cancer-afflicted-people-since-prehistoric-times-fossils-show

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28cancer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.aimjournal.ir/pdffiles/42_OCT013_0015.pdf

http://medicineworld.org/cancer/history.htmlhttp://www.news-medical.net/health/History-of-Breast-Cancer.aspx

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/2013/06/23/the-hunt-for-the-prehistoric-roots-of-cancer/

DiveCat

While it only goes refers to evidence of cancer thousands of years ago up to more modern times, The Emperor of All Maladies (http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography/dp/1439170916) is also a fascinating read about the history of cancer, the attitudes towards it, and the treatment thereof.

I don't really believe cancer is a modern disease though I know that is a rather popular sentiment. I do think attitudes, knowledge, discourse, and treatment around it have changed and made it seem more prominent. That being said, I also will not say that cancer is not seen "more" these days, so here are my thoughts on why we may "see" cancer more now (recognizing that the scarcity of documentation does not mean there was lower cancer rates if we could truly compare one population to another, but just assuming for these purposes it does).

1. We live longer...therefore cancer now has more opportunity to get us before something else does (eg. starvation, malnutrition, typhoid, flu, scurvy, an enemy, a blood infection due to a small cut, a pack of wild dogs...and so on). The biggest risk factor for a number of cancers is aging.

2. We live longer...therefore more of us get the number of mutations required to trigger cancer development before we die of something else (see above). (it is also important to note that some are born with certain mutations...hereditary cancer syndromes....so already start off with close to or at the number of mutations required to trigger cancer development).

3. We are exposed to more mutation causing elements (radiation, chemicals, estrogen-mimicking chemicals). Smoking of course, for example, has a very, very strong and direct causative link to lung cancer and we saw lung cancers increase as smoking became more popular (and start to decline again when it became less so). However, I will note that the past is not exactly free of toxic exposures even if we try and paint it as rosy. See the history of scrotal cancer and young chimney sweeps in the 1700s...think of all those who worked 18+ hour days in toxic factories during the Industrial Revolution, and yeesh, the ladies that used to powder their faces with arsenic (arsenic has been lined to skin, bladder, and lung cancer for example)....so the idea that things are "worse" now is not necessarily true. People tend to romanticize the past. I don't know what they were doing back in prehistoric days, but it is a bit misguided to think toxic exposure is unique to the 20th and 21st centuries.

4. We now identify cancers that in past we may not have due to lack of knowledge, certain ideas of purity (even as recent as the 1970s my relatives who had breast cancer would NEVER have said so), or may not have even recognized as cancer. Cancer comes in so many different forms and types, and this was not well understood in the past. If an infant or child died of inherited retinoblastoma in the 12th century, would that be documented as cancer? "Blood" cancers, like leukemia, certainly were not well understood until more modern times. And so on. In other words, we may actually understand it, document it, and create a discourse around it now whereas in the past this just was not so.

SelenaWolf

The emerging field of paleo-oncology is fascinating and, what I am looking forward to is, once cancer genomes are fully documented, will they be able to de-code ancient DNA and see what cancer genes were lurking?  That, I think, will give us a better idea of how prone to cancer ancient humans were.

 

wallycat

The same thing is emerging for cardiovascular plaques/atherosclerosis.