With this hopeless condition of affairs it is no use saying that the results of surgery are bad. They are; but it is not the fault of doctors, or the methods at their disposal; it is the misfortune of the patient that her lack of proper education must bear the blame. Cancer of the uterus is in many cases preceded by precancerous lesions, all amenable to various kinds of treatment. Again, the only way to deal with it is not to wait and see whether a woman has got cancer but to look and see that she has not. Until this is our attitude, the results are not likely to be much better, whatever the means at our disposal for its cure. Finally, turning to another great group of cancers which make up thirty per cent. of all in men (and in women too, if we exclude the two previously mentioned types), we find exactly the same condition of affairs. In two out of every three cases of cancer of the stomach there is evidence that it has arisen in an old ulcer, and Dr Mayo has suggested that eating hot food may account for the remaining third. It is moreover the experience of all surgeons who systematically submit all gastric ulcers upon which they operate to microscopic examination, that about twenty per cent. of them all are malignant. We have before us the plain fact that from ten to twenty per cent. of all chronic ulcers which have come for surgical treatment are already malignant and can only be cured by a complete removal. Another fact also requires taking into the most serious consideration, and this is, that it is the considered opinion of by far the large majority of experienced surgeons that exploration and some form of operation is the best treatment for every case of chronic gastric ulcer which has recurred once, or at least twice, after a thorough course of medical treatment. (The term “chronic gastric ulcer” is here used in its strictest scientific sense, and by it is meant an ulcer whose diameter in any one direction is more than a centimeter, and whose edges are hard and thickened). In spite of this, a distinguished surgeon recently put on record that every case of gastric ulcer upon which he operated had on an average been “cured” nine times. Why is this? The reason is clear. In nearly every case the symptoms of gastric ulcer (and, remember! twenty per cent. are already cancerous) can be relieved for a time by palliative treatment, when once again the deluded patient thinks he is cured. There is no need for me to point the lesson from this. I have put forward the facts, and every one can draw his own conclusions. There is only one gleam of hope that I can see on the horizon, and that is, in dealing with the disease in an early stage by radical measures, and, in twenty per cent. of the cases, thus combining prevention with cure.