Cancer

In a general way it is known that all natives along this coast were eating some white man's food at most of their meals after 1913; see, for instance, the descriptions of typical meals by Dr. Diamond Jenness in his Dawn in Arctic Alaska (University of Minnesota Press, 1957). The book was compiled from the notes Dr. Jenness kept while he was anthropologist of our third expedition, the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-18. See also my own writings about the coast east of Point Barrow for the years 1906-14. (In view of the idea of some, that the application of extreme heat to food is carcinogenic, it might be noted that a chief European food item around 1910-30 was fried bread — doughnuts, crullers — cooked in exceedingly hot seal oil).

An even more striking proof that a prophecy may be familiar to those who have forgotten the name of the prophet, is found in the already mentioned, important Cancer: Its Nature, Cause and Cure, published in English during 1957 at Paris by Dr. Alexander Berglas of the Pasteur Institute. Throughout the book runs the theme that cancer is a disease from which the nature peoples are relatively or wholly free. A most noteworthy statement of this view is contributed by Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer in a preface from which I quote by permission of Dr. Berglas.

The sketch of Schweitzer begins, “Missionary surgeon, founder of the hospital at Lambaréné ...” The Schweitzer preface includes:

“On my arrival in Gabon, in 1913, I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer ... I can not, of course, say positively that there was no cancer at all, but, like other frontier doctors, I can only say that if any cases existed they must have been quite rare. This absence of cancer seemed to me due to the difference in nutrition of the natives as compared with the Europeans ...

“In the course of the years, we have seen cases of cancer in growing numbers in our region. My observations incline me to attribute this to the fact that the natives were living more and more after the manner of the whites ...

"I have naturally been interested in any research tracing the occurrence of cancer to some defect in our mode of nutrition ...”

Pages 46-47: “In 1914 there was published in New York by Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, surgeon at the New York Skin and Cancer Hospital, an outstanding contribution of The Cancer Problem [in which Dr. Bainbridge, says] ‘... (man) in his primeval condition ... has been thought to be very little subject to new growths, particularly to those of malignant character. With changed environment, it is claimed by some, there came an increase in susceptibility to cancerous disease, this susceptibility becoming more marked as civilization develops; in other words, as environment changes.’

“With particular reference to the nutritional theory, Bainbridge observes that ‘It is held by some that cancer and cancer-like growths, whether in plants, animals or man, are due to changes in nutrition which cause altered growth and impaired development, the fundamental physiological and pathological processes being the same in plants and animals ... The influence upon cancer incidence of climate, soil, diet and habits of life, has not been proved. In other words, it has not been established that any of these factors are potent to absolutely prevent the occurrence of cancer.’”

According to Who's Who, Livingston French Jones, born in 1865, graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1891. From 1892 to 1914 he was a missionary and in 1914 he published at New York A Study of the Thlingets of Alaska, those woodland and shore Indians whom you pass soon after you reach Ketchikan when you come from Seattle, and all along from there to Juneau and almost to Anchorage. South of the Athapaskans, they are the most important forest Indians of Alaska. Jones says in his preface:

“The information imparted to the public in the following pages has been gleaned by the writer almost entirely from the natives themselves, either through their lips or by his own personal observation. Having lived and laboured among them more than twenty years, he has had exceptional opportunities ...” He goes on to say that he has also read widely, to compare the observations and views of others with his own.

As explained previously, it was common with northern missionaries of the late nineteenth century to name cancer as one of a group of diseases that were believed to be rare or absent. I quote from Jones the first paragraphs of his chapter on “Diseases,” and enough more to show the trend of his thinking:

“While certain diseases have always been found among the Thlingets, others that now afflict them are of recent introduction. Tumors, cancers and toothache were unknown to them until within recent years.

“The older ones have yet sound and excellent teeth while the rising generation experiences the white people's misfortune of cavities, toothache and dental torture ... The white man's food, especially his sweetmeats, which are now freely indulged in by the natives, is, no doubt, largely the cause of this change.

“While consumption is now the most prevalent disease among them, we are told by the natives themselves and by careful historians that it is an imported disease ...”

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.”