How old is cancer (the disease, not zodiac sign). Cause ive never heard of anyone dying of it before the twentieth century.

Napoleon died of cancer in 1821.
Charles XI, king of Sweden, died of it in 1697.
And heaps more beside.

Cancer itself predates humanity and is probably as old as complex organic life.

I think pretty much all animals can have cancer. So hundreds of millions of years old, at least. Does anyone know if any other eukaryotic organisms can have cancer?

Cancer was still widespread before the 20th century. However it's more prevalent these days because people live longer. It's very rare for young people to get cancer and far more common in older people.

There's also the fact that medecine in the 19th century and before was pretty much a "guessing" science. And autopsy were illegal by the church at this time. So people just died back then. Old people died of old age, women died of some kind of shameful women problem, etc. Plus a lot of people died of the flu or scurvy or something like that so they didnt get the chance to live long enough to get cancer.

Hope this make sense.

I want to point out that english isnt my first langage, so what i wrote isnt necesserally what i meant but it is pretty close

There's also the fact that medecine in the 19th century and before was pretty much a "guessing" science. And autopsy were illegal by the church at this time. So people just died back then. Old people died of old age, women died of some kind of shameful women problem, etc. Plus a lot of people died of the flu or scurvy or something like that so they didnt get the chance to live long enough to get cancer.

Hope this make sense.


I dont think so. Ive seen a list of every single ruler of england, and almost all of the reasons for their deaths were known. I know that doesn't mean that much, but chances are at least one of them would have died of cancer. Maybe cancer only got really widespread in the 20th century.

Well, cancer is not human made, so it is quite old. (few million years as an estimate)

Cancer's been around as long as there's been replicating cells. In other times, other stuff killed people before they could get cancer, that's all.

If you look at records, you will also realise that "tuberculosis" is a "new" disease... before that they simply died of "consumption". ;)

Cancer's been around as long as there's been replicating cells. In other times, other stuff killed people before they could get cancer, that's all.

If you look at records, you will also realise that "tuberculosis" is a "new" disease... before that they simply died of "consumption". ;)

So what was the famed "gripping of the guts"?

So what was the famed "gripping of the guts"?

Well, my guess: "gripping of the guts" is something that happens a lot to patients with gallbladder and kidney stones... so my guess is that it was complications from gallbladder and/or kidney stones. Pancreatitis too, probably, and that's a lot more fulminant.

Edit: Also, potentially, bowel and intestinal obstructions and intestinal necrosis.

All multicellular organisms can get cancer. I don't understand how it can be thought of as a 20th century invention.

http://www.cancerdecisions.com/speeches/galen1989.html

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/1192.html

http://www.chemheritage.org/EducationalServices/pharm/chemo/readings/ages.htm

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cancer/HO00033

not invention. a lot diseases aren't new. Virtually every cold is completely origina; thats why people keep on getting them, for example. diseases keep on changing with the times, because of the conditions around them.

Hippocrates, Celsus and Galen all described cancers. Celsus used the very word.

Cancer is a disease caused by a malignant tumor; thus anything that can get a tumor, (any multicellular organism) can get cancer. The reason cancer isn't mentioned as common a source of death from earlier human history is because
a) medical mis diagnosis
b) people weren't living to be old enough to have enough mutations to cause a tumor.

I dont think so. Ive seen a list of every single ruler of england, and almost all of the reasons for their deaths were known. I know that doesn't mean that much, but chances are at least one of them would have died of cancer. Maybe cancer only got really widespread in the 20th century.
You wouldn't have the list so you can post it?

Maybe we could do a thread on historical causes of death for royalty?:)

Post-dating historical medical diagnosis is a very popular game with medical professionals. Historians of medicine tend to be very sceptical to the same thing because just about everything about how we define healthy and pathological, specific diseases and the agents of it, has totally changed in the last couple of hundred years. They simply aren't comparable anymore.

Of course cancer was known in antiquity. People just didn't know precisely what it was; probably an awful lot of deaths from cancer were simply ascribed to old age. The name "cancer" comes from the belief that cancers looked like crabs. Eeeoo!

This article (http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060403_dino_med.html) discusses among other things cancer in dinosaurs. :)

Well, cancer is not human made, so it is quite old. (few million years as an estimate)Just to put it into perspective: Humans and chimps split from their common ancestor around 5 million years ago.

The earliest animal fossils are from around 575 million years ago.
Eukaryotic cells came around 1600-2100 million years ago.

Cancer is found in plants too. Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants.

Presumably it's around 1 billion years old.

Cancer is found in plants too. Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants.

Presumably it's around 1 billion years old.
Actually, given that plants and animals (and fungi) achieved multicellularity independently, cancer will have arisen in them independently too. Since animals, AFAIK, are the oldest multicellular lineage, cancer will first have shown its tumorous face shortly after the first appearance of animals (metazoans), probably much less than 1 Gya, perhaps around 600 Mya.

(Hm. I suppose its a matter of definition if rogue cell lines in colonial protists can be termed cancers. If so, the origin would be pushed back by some unknown but probably large amount of time.)

The chance of a male having a prostate cancer is 100% if he lives long enough.

(I mean even if you have a very good health, you are gonna die from prostate cancer eventually. There is no way of escaping prostate cancer for men)

Empress Theodora I believe died of cancer.

The chance of a male having a prostate cancer is 100% if he lives long enough.

(I mean even if you have a very good health, you are gonna die from prostate cancer eventually. There is no way of escaping prostate cancer for men)

Why is that?

If you look at records, you will also realise that "tuberculosis" is a "new" disease... before that they simply died of "consumption". ;)

Consumption & tuberculosis are the same thing. Consumption is just an older term that is no longer used.

I don't know what the statistics are, but it certainly seems like cancer is getting more common as time goes on. On one hand, the world's population is growing very vast. On the other, we are eating more & more nonnatural, processed foods & our environment is much more contaminated by pollution & chemicals than ever before.

The chance of a male having a prostate cancer is 100% if he lives long enough.

(I mean even if you have a very good health, you are gonna die from prostate cancer eventually. There is no way of escaping prostate cancer for men)

But prostate cancer isn't necessarily fatal.

I dont think so. Ive seen a list of every single ruler of england, and almost all of the reasons for their deaths were known. I know that doesn't mean that much, but chances are at least one of them would have died of cancer. Maybe cancer only got really widespread in the 20th century.

Its generally thought Queen Mary I died of ovarian cancer - I wonder what your list gave as her cause of death?

I don't know what the statistics are, but it certainly seems like cancer is getting more common as time goes on. On one hand, the world's population is growing very vast. On the other, we are eating more & more nonnatural, processed foods & our environment is much more contaminated by pollution & chemicals than ever before.

No doubt junkfood and pollution helps a bit, but the reason for the increase in cancer is that people live longer.

How old is cancer (the disease, not zodiac sign). Cause ive never heard of anyone dying of it before the twentieth century.

That's because it wasn't until a few hundred years ago that dissection of the human body became acceptable practice, so it wasn't always possible to know the cause of death for anything, cancer or otherwise. Before this, dissection was taboo. Cancer was described at least as early as the time of Hippocrates (c. 300 BC) and comes from the word for crab, because as it spreads, it resembles a crab.

Actually, I think the period when human dissection was most taboo was more the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was not only possible but extremely popular in early modern times - there was a sort of craze for dissection and anatomical lectures in the seventeenth century - but then people started getting funny ideas about religion and got scared of it. In Britain, at least, dissection only became widely possible again after the Anatomy Act of 1829, possibly the most notorious and hated piece of legislation of the nineteenth century.

But prostate cancer isn't necessarily fatal.

Far as I can tell, if the patient receives decent treatment, it is usually not. (It also seems that in many cases they opt for palliative rather than curative treatment -- the disease's progression is often very slow, and since most patients are older men, they can keep the cancer at bay for ages and then die from something else).

Actually, I think the period when human dissection was most taboo was more the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was not only possible but extremely popular in early modern times - there was a sort of craze for dissection and anatomical lectures in the seventeenth century - but then people started getting funny ideas about religion and got scared of it. In Britain, at least, dissection only became widely possible again after the Anatomy Act of 1829, possibly the most notorious and hated piece of legislation of the nineteenth century.

Dissection was at least theoretically condemned by the RCC in renaissance times. Some of the early Italian anatomists are supposed to've surreptiously dug their subjects out of graveyards.

How old is cancer (the disease, not zodiac sign). Cause ive never heard of anyone dying of it before the twentieth century.

Technically speaking, cancer has been around as long as there have been animals on this planet (yes animals do get cancer).

The reason you haven't heard of it before the 20th century is because of our medical knowledge or rather, a lack thereof.

The chance of a male having a prostate cancer is 100% if he lives long enough.

(I mean even if you have a very good health, you are gonna die from prostate cancer eventually. There is no way of escaping prostate cancer for men)

Theoretically, that could be said of anything - if nothing else besides, say, gout kills me, of course gout will kill me.

Dissection was at least theoretically condemned by the RCC in renaissance times. Some of the early Italian anatomists are supposed to've surreptiously dug their subjects out of graveyards.

This is true. But I was talking about popular attitudes. As with most things, the Catholic Church's pronouncement on this matter didn't reflect popular opinion, at least in Europe as a whole - although it no doubt helped to influence popular opinion over the succeeding centuries. Thus, we don't really hear of the "resurrectionists" as a serious problem until the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Interesting historical fact 1: David Hume, like many wealthy people of the time, paid to have his grave watched for some time after his death to ensure that his body wasn't stolen. Odd, as you wouldn't think he would have cared.

Interesting historical fact 2: Lawrence Sterne's body really was stolen and ended up on someone's slab. But someone recognised it and had it put back, undissected. At least, so it is said.

Bear in mind that Western Europe =/= the entire world at any point in history. Ohter cultures often had different ideas.

Of course. But a good part of the taboo against dissection, when it existed, came from the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. I don't know to what extent other cultures, lacking that doctrine, had the taboo. It would be interesting to find out.

Its generally thought Queen Mary I died of ovarian cancer - I wonder what your list gave as her cause of death?

Which queen mary? The ist,2nd or the one from the 20th century (i forgot her husbands name)?

Which queen mary? The ist,2nd or the one from the 20th century (i forgot her husbands name)?

He's talking about Bloody Mary.
One theory of Catherine of Aragon's death is that she died of a cardiac cancer.

sydhe is right - I mean Mary Tudor.

My list (something that has to do with the british society, from 1961-Napoleon died in the same year no matter the history book or date of publication) says Mary Tudor died of 'endemic influenza'.

Of course, due to incomplete medical knowledge in history, you are often going to see people dying of what doctors today would now call 'sympotms' or 'syndromes', which might have had their source in a wide variety of different technical 'diseases'. They would be unable to make a perfect diagnosis without having the person actually present to run tests on them, or perhaps perform an autopsy (which is far more error-prone than having the live patient). So a lot of people in history may or may not have 'actually died from cancer'.

Regardless, one certain truth is that cancer is steadily increasing over rigorous recorded history of the disease both in how common it is, and how young the average person is to suffer from it. So its reasonable to suppose that cancer may have been far less common in pre-industial eras when there was less exposure to artificial substances/radiation/EMR.

This article (http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060403_dino_med.html) discusses among other things cancer in dinosaurs. :)

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a109/Soggyberty/untitled.png

Queen Mary the one which made catholicism in england again died of stomach cancer, she thought she was pregnant for a while

Back then people died so young, they really didn't have time to die of cancer.

actually its not true, if u managed to live past infancy in most places on earth you could expect to live just as old as people live today. Except with certain places such as the absurdly unsanitized and overcrowded places as occured in europe.

Actually, no. You could expect to live above the median age of 20-something, but you'd be considered very old indeed to get past 50 or 60, not to mention today's average of 78-80 years (The average life xpectancy for a Roman citizen was, I believe, 50). Most places were "absrudly unsanitized", though not overcrowded, during most of human existence. You'd have to go back to Rome or Greece in ancient times to find mostly acceptable hygiene, even though they, too, left their crap in the streets. Only China has managed to hang onto a minimum of hygiene for more than about a millenium, and Japan is the runner-up. Also, any disease that is fatal unless cured today would kill you back then. You could die from a flu easily. Not to mention all the inmjuries that got infected and killed people and that would be stitched up today with only a scar to show. And then, when you had survived all that, you suddenly found yourself completely worn out from hard work all your life, and died a decade or two before today's average.

I believe they found signs of cancer on the mummy of an egyptian pharaoh. In the jaws, I believe. I also think they found a T-rex who had died from cancer, though both pieces of information would need to be verified.

I can't find any information on tyrannosaur cancer. The closest I could find was this (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060713233840.htm), an interesting study on mortality rates among the related Albertosaurs. It seems that once Albertosaurs reached the age of two, they tended to stay alive until their teens, at which point the chances of death began to increase. Only 2% reached the maximum size, suggesting that they would not have generally lived long enough to get cancer. Which would be true of virtually all wild animals, I should think, especially large carnivores.

Actually, no. You could expect to live above the median age of 20-something, but you'd be considered very old indeed to get past 50 or 60, not to mention today's average of 78-80 years


Well, sort of. Without access to modern medicine everyone, at all ages, would face a higher annual risk of death from disease and accidents and so on (or other permanent decline in health, again leading to a shorter life expectancy and lower quality of what life they had left) -- so there'd be a higher attrition rate across the board. In most societies the transition from middle age to old age would come somewhat sooner than it does for us today, and (this is the biggest difference IMHO) people who had made it to being "old" would normally be pretty worn out and frail and not last very long. While there have always been some people reaching great ages and retaining admirable vigour past 60, 70 or even 80, these used to be very rare outliers; now they are increasingly common.

[...] While there have always been some people reaching great ages and retaining admirable vigour past 60, 70 or even 80, these used to be very rare outliers; now they are increasingly common.
That's what I said. Sorta. I hope.
Anyway, it's not true that you'd live as long as now if you just made it through adolescence.

I have read materials that indicates plants can also have tumors and cancers, just a mutated organic part may turn out to be cancer.

That's what I said. Sorta. I hope.


Yeah, I'm not contradicting, just supplementing.


Anyway, it's not true that you'd live as long as now if you just made it through adolescence.

Statistically, you're right -- the mean life expectancy for people who had already reached a given age would always be somewhat lower than it is for modern-day first-worlders. You'd still have a chance of making it to some really old age, just a lower chance than in modern times.

If you look at portrayals of the elderly in contemporary literature and non-fiction sources from various periods, you can also see a quite interesting change in their expected quality of life, just over the past few decades. The idea that it is normal for the 70+ set to be active and vigorous as opposed to being worn-out, frail and nearly dead is that recent -- even though there have always been examples to the contrary, these were considered rare exceptions.

Well, sort of. Without access to modern medicine everyone, at all ages, would face a higher annual risk of death from disease and accidents and so on (or other permanent decline in health, again leading to a shorter life expectancy and lower quality of what life they had left) -- so there'd be a higher attrition rate across the board. In most societies the transition from middle age to old age would come somewhat sooner than it does for us today, and (this is the biggest difference IMHO) people who had made it to being "old" would normally be pretty worn out and frail and not last very long. While there have always been some people reaching great ages and retaining admirable vigour past 60, 70 or even 80, these used to be very rare outliers; now they are increasingly common.

Um-huh. And thats why roman soldiers retirered in their 50's, because they were so frail by then( the best soldier being weak and close to death,of course).

Um-huh. And thats why roman soldiers retirered in their 50's, because they were so frail by then( the best soldier being weak and close to death,of course).
Actually, I think the "serve for 20 years and get full Roman citizenship and a plot of land of your own in newly annexed territory" clause was a bigger motivating factor for retirement than old age.