“Your parents would have. But you have profited by popular education. If the public understood what to do in cancer as thoroughly as they know about tuberculosis, we’d save almost if not quite as many victims from the more terrible disease. Fatalism is as out of place in the one as in the other. The gist of the matter is taking the thing in time. Let me read you what the chairman of the Cancer Campaign Committee of the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, of Baltimore, says: ‘Surgeons are heartsick to see the many cancer patients begging for operations when the disease is so far advanced that nothing can be done. Cancer is in the beginning a local process and not a blood disease, and in its early stages can be completely removed. When the cancer is small the surgeon can, with one fourth the amount of labor, accomplish ten times the amount of good.’” “Does that always mean the knife?” asked a timid-looking woman. “Always. There is no other hope, once the malignant growth has begun. But the knife is not so terrible. In fact, in the early stages it is not terrible at all. Modern surgery has reduced pain to a minimum. The strongest argument against dread is a visit to a well-equipped surgical hospital, where one can see patients sitting up in bed and enjoying life a few days after a major operation. Even at the worst, the knife is less terrible than death, its certain alternative.” “Why do you call it the certain alternative?” asked the minister’s wife. “I have seen facial cancer cured by concentrated ray treatment.” “That wasn’t cancer; it was lupus,” replied Dr. Strong; “a wholly different thing. True cancer of the face in its commonest location, the lips, is the most frequently cured of any form, but only by operation. Now here’s an interesting and suggestive point; taking lip-cancer patients as they come to us, we get perhaps sixty-five per cent of complete cures. With cancer of the womb, we get in all not more than forty per cent of recoveries. Perhaps some of you will be able to suggest the explanation for this contrast.” “Because cancer of the lip isn’t as deadly a disease,” ventured some one. “Cancer is cancer, wherever it is located. Unless it is removed it is always and equally deadly.” “Then it is because the internal operation is so much more dangerous,” offered another member.