Bristol : John Wright & Sons Ltd. 7s. 6d. net. THIS little book is a record of some cases of malignant disease operated on by the author, and contains forty excellent illustrations of the specimens removed. The cases are examples of cancer from all the common sites, and many are instances of advanced disease. Mr. Grey Turner has followed up these cases in order to determine the length of life after operation and the cause of death, and the book has been written to encourage surgeoils to persevere in efforts to relieve, and a t times to cure, patients suffering from what appear to be, in many instances, very unfavourable growths from the operative point of view.
He is fully alive to the advantages of operating in the earliest possible stage of the disease, but he points out, and we think rightly, that a long history often means a good resistance on the part of the patient, and that a formidable lump, under these circumstances, does not necessarily deprive the patient of the possibility of being cured by a sufficiently determined effort on the surgeon's part. There is an inclination in the minds of quite a number of the profession to regard all operations for malignant disease as doomed to failure, irrespective of the stage at which the patient is seen, of the fight he may have put up against the disease as evidenced by the duration of the symptoms and the general well-being in spite of a large local lesion, and of his desire to take what is, after all, his only chance of getting rid of the disorder. We recognize that this gloomy outlook is not seldom justified by events, but we recommend those who suffer from this hopeless attitude of mind to read this book of Mr. Grey Turner's, and to revise their antipathy to operation, for they will find reliable records of patients living many years who would inevitably have been dead of their disease years before, and moreover who, when they did die, succumbed to something quite unconnected with the cancerous growths for which the operations were performed.
Mr. Grey Turner says in his book that in his opinion every case which does not show unequivocal evidence of dissemination should have the chance which only an operation offers, and in our view this is the only justifiable advice to give patients suffering from this disease a t the present time. It is the unanimous opinion of all those who know anything about malignant disease that it is in the first place a local lesion, and probably remains so longer than we think, and that it can always be removed entirely if the attempt be made before dissemination begins. It is only by adopting an optimistic attitude towards the operative treatment of malignant disease that we, as a profession, can hope to induce patients to comc earlier and yet earlier for treatment, and this is the key to the situation from the curative point of view.
If Rlr. Grey Turner's book does anything towards converting the pessimists of the profession i t will have achieved a most useful purpose, and we feel that a careful study of the cases recorded cannot have any other effect on an unbiased mind.