Summarizing under “Cancer among Primitive Races” such reports from the frontier as were available to him up to 1914, Hoffman says on pages 146-47: “The rarity of cancer among native races suggests that the disease is primarily induced by the conditions and methods of living which typify our modern civilization ...

“... a large number of medical missionaries, and other trained medical observers, living for years among native races throughout the world, would long ago have provided a more substantial basis of fact regarding the frequency of occurrence of malignant disease among the so-called uncivilized races, if cancer were met with among them to anything like the degree common to practically all civilized countries.

“Quite to the contrary, the negative evidence is convincing that, in the opinion of qualified medical observers, cancer is exceptionally rare among the primitive peoples, including the North American Indians and the Eskimo population of Labrador and Alaska.”