What, then, is the real problem of cancer? Surely it is not to increase the surgical activity, which has resulted only in a steadily ascending scale of mortality, which in reality is greater than that observed in any other malady! For the increase in the death rate from cancer throughout the United States from 1900 to the present time has been coincident with the greatest activity both in laboratory research, and in the advanced surgery of the disease. I repeat, is it not time for us to stop and consider whether our laboratory work with the microscope on morbid tissues, and our experimentation on rats and mice are truly serving to solve the real problem of cancer? Or whether we had not better turn our attention to human beings, and by careful clinical study of our patients, discover where the fundamental error lies, which first induces the formation of an aberrant cell mass, which we call cancer, and then continually feeds it by the same deranged blood stream, so that it becomes utterly uncontrollable and invades and destroys other tissues; while at the same time the anemia, pernicious and progressive in character, gradually saps the life of the patient to a lethal end? For repeated and most careful laboratory studies have demonstrated great and significant changes in the blood in cancer. I hope to satisfy you that the mass which is excised is only the _product_ of a far deeper systemic change, which has probably already produced other, more or less similar masses or deposits elsewhere—in the bones and internal organs or lymphatics. So that surgical removal of the one often stimulates the development of others. It is seen, then, that it is here denied that the local lesion which we call cancer is the first and only cause of disease. It is also denied that the surgical removal of the offending lump and adjoining glands and tissues, however early it is performed, is a sure and only cure for cancer.