A Treatise on Cancer of the Breast and of the Mammary Region (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1856 Excerpt: ...it does not always follow the same route, it does not always take up the same time. Thus the epithelial cancer, very rare in the breast, is compatible in certain cases--in the face, for example--with a long existence; the encephaloid, on the contrary, which assigns seldom more than from two to four years, often progresses more quickly; it is the same with the melanosis. The progress of certain scirrhuses of the hard or ligneous, of the atrophic especially, is sometimes very slow. It is it which lasts in some women ten, fifteen, or twenty years, before destroying life; the lardaceous scirrhus, on the contrary, proceeding almost rapidly as the encephaloid. It is the same with the ligneous scirrhus en masse, with the ligneous scirrhus in plates or cuirass. With the disseminated pustular scirrhus, as with the fibro-plastic cancer and the chondroid, the patient may live several years. All cancers kill either by infecting the economy with their destructive principles, or by the progressive seizure of the tissues and of the organs. The prognostic of the cancer is, moreover, the same at all ages, in both sexes, in every condition of life, individual or general. It is true, however, that young persons die somewhat more quickly than the advanced in years; although certain aged people fall as rapidly before the disease as those of thirty or forty years. It has not been proved that the critical period in woman exercises a manifest influence over the progress of cancer, that it magnifies the severity or the frequency of the disease. It is from forty to sixty years that cancer most frequently attacks the breast in woman; but it is also at this period that we see the greatest number of cancers in man. Besides, we do not observe more from forty-five to fifty, than from for...