Great Books in Homeopathy: The Cure of Tumours: Book number 5 in this collection

THERE are few homoeopathic practitioners of any wide experience who have not seen tumours decrease in size and disappear altogether under treatment by medicine, but there are still fewer who start out with the determination to treat with medicine every case of tumour which comes under their care, and yet, if tumours are curable by means of medicine, it is by far the most pleasant and scientific way of dealing with them.
. As homoeopaths have done infinitely more of this kind of work than practitioners of the other school, I think it important for every homoeopathic practitioner to put on record his experience for the help and guidance of others.
For it must be admitted that the cure of tumours by medicine is not always easy. The method of the surgeon which removes the lump is far more expeditious, and appeals with considerable force to the imagination of the majority. I am not going to attempt to draw a line between the province of the surgeon and the province of the physician in the treatment of tumours. That is a line which does not exist; or, rather, it is a line which every physician and every surgeon must draw for himself. My own part in these pages will be to show what has been done from the physician's side, and, as far as possible, what may be done and how it may be done.
It is not within my present purpose to make any attempt to exactly differentiate between tumours of different kinds, not even between malignant and non-malignant. Nature herself has not drawn any hard-and-fast line, and for that matter neither have remedies. I shall be able to give instances of tumours, undoubtedly innocent, cured by cancer nosodes; and, on the other hand, I can give cases of undoubtedly malignant growths cured by vegetable remedies.

There was a very thoughtful paper by Mr. W. H. Clayton Greene, F.R.C.S., published in the Medical Press of May 23rd, 1906, and communicated originally to the Harveian Society, called "Simple Tumours, and their relation to Malignant Disease." From this paper I will take the liberty of making a few quotations.

"We have been accustomed," says Mr. Greene, "for a long time to divide our new growths into two classes-simple and malignant by means of a hypothetical border line, but we have not as yet been able satisfactorily to ascertain those factors which lead to the transgression of this imperceptible barrier and which institute a malignant change.
"During the last few years the limelight of experimental research has been turned upon the various forms of malignant disease, and although we have undoubtedly learned many important details with regard to their structure and method of growth, we are still in the dark as to their causation.
"While this prominent position has been occupied by tumours which are undoubtedly malignant, those growths which are still classified as simple have been left in obscurity, and we ourselves, content with textbook dicta, have come to regard them of slight importance, unlikely in most cases to influence the life of their unfortunate possessor in an adverse manner.

"It is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been directed to this subject, and how little the relationship between these simple and malignant forms of growth has been appreciated.

"During the last few years the limelight of experimental research has been turned upon the various forms of malignant disease, and although we have undoubtedly learned many important details with regard to their structure and method of growth, we are still in the dark as to their causation.
"While this prominent position has been occupied by tumours which are undoubtedly malignant, those growths which are still classified as simple have been left in obscurity, and we ourselves, content with textbook dicta, have come to regard them of slight importance, unlikely in most cases to influence the life of their unfortunate possessor in an adverse manner.