y developed anti-social tendencies, or a
Mongolian immigrant who has been accidentally introduced, is still an
open question. The probabilities are that it is more frequently the
latter, as, while boils are absolutely no respecters, either of persons
or places, and may rear their horrid heads in every possible region of
the human form divine, yet they display a very decided tendency to
appear most frequently in regions like the back of the neck, the wrist,
the hips, and the nose. One thing that these areas have in common is
that they are liable to a considerable amount of chafing and scratching
as by collars and stocks on the neck, and cuffs on the wrists, or of
friction from belts, or pressure or chafing from chairs or saddles. When
the tissues have been bruised or chafed after such fashion, especially
if the surface of the skin has been at the same time broken, and any
pus-organism is either present in the hair-follicle, like the white
coccus, or rubbed into it by a finger or finger-nail which has just been
sucked in the mouth, used to pick the nose, or possibly engaged in
dressing some wound, or cutting meat, or handling fertilizer, then all
the materials for an explosion are at hand.

CHAPTER XVI

CANCER, OR TREASON IN THE BODY-STATE

The imagination of the race has ever endowed Cancer with a peculiar
individuality of its own. Although it has vaguely personified in darkest
ages other diseases, like the Plague, the Pestilence, and _Maya_ (the
Smallpox), these have rapidly faded away in even the earliest light of
civilization, and have never approached in concreteness and definiteness
the malevolent personality of Cancer. Its sudden appearance, the utter
absence of any discoverable cause, the twinges of agonizing pain that
shoot out from it in all directions, its stone-like hardness in the
soft, elastic flesh of the body, the ruthless way in which it eats into
and destroys every organ and tissue that come in its way, make this
impression, not merely of personality, but of positive malevolence,
almost unescapable.

Its very name is instinct and bristling with this idea: _Krebs_, in
German, _Cancer_, in Latin, French, and English, _Carcinoma_, in Greek,
all alike mean "Crab," a ghastly, flesh-eating parasite, gnawing its way
into the body. The simile is sufficiently obvious. The hard mass is the
body of the beast; the pain of the growth is due to his bite; the hard
ridges of scar tissue which radiate in all