The first evidence of a hominid with cancer takes us back 1.7 million years. It was the Greeks who described it as a crab, giving it the name “cancer”. The Persian physician Ibn Sina first wrote about metastasis. In the 20th century, the two world wars gave way to chemotherapy. Today, new treatments and tools contribute to increasingly surviving this disease.
It’s just a left toe foot bone. Found in 2016 in South Africa, 1.7 million years old, presented some strange deformations that contained a key fact: the hominid to which it belonged, of a species that cannot be determined, suffered from osteosarcoma. It is a particularly aggressive cancer that attacks the bones and that still appears today, especially in children and young people.
This evidence is the oldest documented case of cancer in humans (or its closest relatives) and reminds us that this disease is not exclusively a modern ailment. Despite the fact that the increase in life expectancy and changes in the habits of societies in the last hundred years have caused cases to increase, our cells have gone from being healthy to reproducing uncontrollably and becoming malignant since the beginning of time. .
In it Edwin Smith papyrus, written around the 3rd millennium BC, the Egyptian priest and scientist Imhotep detailed what is considered the first description of a cancer. He speaks of a “mass” within a person that grows and does not respond to any treatment. He also explains that they were trying to remove it with knives.
Thousands of years later, in 400 B.C. C. in Greece, Hippocrates, known as one of the fathers of Western medicine, He was the one who gave cancer its name: comes from ‘karkinos’, Greek for crab, due to the similarity between the animal and how some cases of metastasis occur. Although the word reached our days, this was not the case with the Hippocratic theories about the causes of the disease: the Greek doctor believed that cancer was caused by an imbalance in the body of “humors”, of body fluids.
For centuries, humanity continued to live with the disease, although without fully understanding it and without having many tools to combat it. Between the X and XI century AD. C. se knows that mastectomies have been performed. In one manuscript, the Persian scientist Ibn Sina (Avicenna, according to his westernized name) described how a tumor grew back in one breast after the other had been removed from the patient. In his writing, Ibn Sina theorized about how metastasis occurs:
“The patient had been cured by surgery. Later, the other breast was affected by the tumor. In this regard, I say that the other breast was affected or that cancerous matter moved from the first breast or other organs to the second, before the cut. In In my opinion, the second theory is more likely.”
Cancer, a contagious disease?
The Hippocratic theory of “humors” persisted in Western medicine for centuries. At one point, some scientists theorized in the s. XVII than the cancer was contagious, since several members of the same family suffered from it. This led them to recommend quarantines for the sick, quarantines that we now know are useless and that these “contagions” were probably due to the genetic hereditary characteristics of some types of cancer.
The scientific method and microscopes gave a boost to research around the disease: it was understood that cells reproduced uncontrollably, causing tumors, and that it spread throughout the body.
Some of the first causal links also began to be established. For example, soot and carbon were found to be associated with lung cancer developed by many workers in the big cities of the industrialization era. Today, lung cancer continues to be the deadliest cancer in the world, and tobacco is the main preventable risk factor.
From the pump to chemotherapy
Understanding the causes of the disease and its development mechanisms opened the door to devising cancer treatments. For example, in one of the most bizarre script twists in historythe world wars played a key role in the development of chemotherapy, the therapy that revolutionized the survival rate of the disease in the 20th century and which, to this day, is still one of the main tools in the fight against cancer.
It was triggered by a German bombing raid on the southern Italian city of Bari in 1943. Seventeen American ships were in the Italian port. The bombs sent them to the bottom of the Mediterranean without knowing that there were tons of mustard gas inside the boats. This chemical agent, the use of which had already been internationally banned by then, is known to cause burns and irritation to the skin and eyes, to cause nausea and, in case of long exposure, to affect the nervous system of people.
The population of Bari was unknowingly exposed to this dangerous gas, with catastrophic consequences for their health. A group of American scientists traveled to the Italian city to better understand the effects of the disaster and noticed a common point in the autopsies but also in the survivors: they registered an extremely low level of white blood cells.
That’s where the idea was born. These cells, key to the immune system, reproduce in an especially fast way, even similar to the uncontrolled division of cancer cells. If mustard gas had slowed, or even stopped white blood cell reproduction, why couldn’t it do the same against tumors?
Years of research and refinement have made it possible to isolate the chemicals that work best to stop metastasis and to specifically target cancer cells, giving rise to chemotherapy.
Today, cancer is the leading cause of death in the world, claiming 10 million lives each year. However, the survival rate is getting higher, thanks to the scientific progress of thousands of researchers around the world. A scientific progress that began thousands of years ago.
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