[1] The conditions upon which new remedies or alleged cures for cancer are permitted in connection with the treatment of patients in the Cancer Wing are:-- (1) The treatment must be carried out by a member of the Hospital Staff. (2) The composition of all remedies must be disclosed to the Cancer Investigation Committee. (3) The consent of the patient must be obtained before the treatment is commenced. #/ In 1817 one Ashby was allowed to try his hand, and was immediately exposed as a fraud. Presently Mr. Whitbread, the younger, introduced a friend of his own, whose treatment by compression he averred to have resulted in “joyful declarations” on the part of patients that they were “greatly relieved.” It sounds an ungracious return for the Whitbread benevolence to hear that the Governors remained “uncontaminated by that love of quackery which is so common among the gentry of England.” But we are told that the treatment “often gave much pain, and often appeared to hasten the end; and in the latter it did not retard the progress of the disease.” “Guy’s caustic” was another popular remedy, and it is of historical interest to read that “it was Guy’s caustic, or rather Plunket’s paste, that killed Lord Bolingbroke.” “Lord Arundel’s cancer cure” was a compound invented by the illiterate wife of a blacksmith. She professed to be a “cancer-curer,” but an unkind commentator observes that “no doubt she killed a great number of poor women.” Dr. Fell, an American, was permitted to make a series of experiments in 1857, but he got nothing from the hospital beyond a rather frigid letter of thanks. Dr. Arnott’s freezing system, about the same time, seems to have met with a larger measure of approval. Not long before this, Lord Metcalfe, the Governor of Canada, had developed the dreaded symptoms, and amongst the remedies recommended for his relief were mesmerism, a powder in which some part of a young frog was the principal ingredient, an application of pure ox-gall, and so on. Amongst provocative causes of the disease, the habit of “smoking tobacco” and the profession of sweeping chimneys were noted as most frequent. Confidence had long been placed in the healing virtues of Wiltshire Holt Water, which came from a spring near Bradford-on-Avon; but discredit was thrown upon this in the following manner: “A young gentleman who acted as House Surgeon to The Middlesex Hospital, had omitted to procure a supply of the Wiltshire Holt Water, which was in much request. To conceal the circumstance he filled one of the accustomed bottles with water from a pump in the apothecary’s shop there, and having inserted a sealed cork to complete the resemblance, he used that water as a substitute. The effects were so similar to those of the genuine mineral water that he continued to employ it, and to gain instruction in his profession.”