Laura Deleruyelle: A History of Cancer

Laura Deleruyelle is a professional nurse who spends her free time looking into medical journals and staying up-to-date with treatment methods for various kinds of cancer. She has been dedicated to the fight against cancer ever since she started her career as a nurse. She believes that one of the key ways to help battle cancer today is to understand its history and impact on humanity over the years.

One of the earliest documented cancer cases was written about on a papyrus that was not discovered until the late 19th century. These documents demonstrated how Egyptians dealt with cancer as a medical process. A description of cancer has been shown by archeologists to date all the way back to 2500 B.C.

Hippocrates, the famous Greek physician and philosopher, also described several different forms of cancer, using words that described crabs to name the unknown disease. This name comes from the strange way a malignant tumor stretches the veins, much like a crab’s feet. However, Hippocrates did not get to adequately explore tumors and cancer because it was against Greek belief to cut open a body. The earliest observations of tumors, then, were done by examining their exteriors.

Early Greek treatments for tumors often included barbaric and ineffective methods such as blood-letting and giving a patient laxatives. This ofcourse did nothing to prevent or battle cancer. However, the practice persisted all the way to the 19th century, when cancer cells were discovered.

Laura Deleruyelle finds it interesting how cancer was viewed and treated throughout the ages of man. Even back then physicians understood how dangerous the disease was, and admitted that they had no ideas for an effective treatment method. In the 16th and 17th century, it finally became a widely accepted practice to examine bodies in the form of autopsies in order to determine how the person died. This vastly improved human knowledge of our own anatomy, as well as disease. Still, many attempts to understand the causes and roots of cancer were feeble and inaccurate at best. One German doctor even believed that breast cancer was caused by milk clots in mammary ducts.

Unfortunately, even today we have only slightly improved our understanding of cancer. Though we have a better general understanding of some of the causes, and even how to help prevent it, our traditional treatments can be invasive and often as harmful as the cancers themselves. However, there are some very successful alternative treatments available such as that offered at the Gerson Institute in Mexico and by the of recent late Nicholas Gonzalez, MD and his colleague Linda Isaacs, MD in New York City. Also, Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, Ph.D offers advanced alternative cancer treatments at the Burzynski Clinic in Houston, Texas.

The Author writes articles for medical and business field. He has also contributed to Wikipedia, Squidoo and Hubpages. His articles have been published in print as well as online magazines.