How Were Cancer Patients Treated Before Chemotherapy Was Invented?

I read that Chemotherapy was first used on patients in the 50’s, so how were patients treated before that time?


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5 Responses to “How Were Cancer Patients Treated Before Chemotherapy Was Invented?”

  1. Very good question
    With respect to Panda, we were doing fairly well with Hogkin’s disease using MOPP chemotherapy before the “War on Cancer” instigated by president Nixon. I remember those times well. We already had Cytoxan and Adriamycin in the early 1970’s. Both are still used extensively today.
    The first chemo drug was nitrogen mustard – an offshoot of mustard gas used as a weapon in WWI. Nitrogen mustard is in the MOPP regimen for Hodgkin’s disease.
    Before the late 1950’s and 1960’s, the best chance was surgery. Breast cancer was treated incorrectly with radical mastectomies and had been since the time of Halsted in the 1880’s. We had a heck of a time in the 1980’s getting surgeons to stop doing these radical procedures once it was clear that breast cancer is most often a systemic disease rather than just a locally invasive malignancy.
    There were early efforts with radiation – x-ray – therapy prior to chemotherapy. Even today early surgery is still the best treatment for most of the many types of cancer. Chemotherapy is a term that covers over 100 drugs now. All of these new drugs are very expensive. The rise in health care costs for malignant diseases has been exponential in the past 10 years especially. We are actually prolonging life more often than curing malignant diseases, but if you think about it – all that doctors can ever do is prolong life. None of us will ever be immortal.
    The short answer is that people were treated with comfort measures in the days before chemotherapy. Most patients died in hospitals. That was before hospice. Prior to the 1950’s, being admitted to the hospital with an inoperable cancer was often equated with a death sentence.
    Also with respect to the site listed by Panda, malignancies have become far more common in the past 100 years than they had ever been in the past. Why? One reason is the direct correlation with the growth of cigarette smoking since the invention of automated cigarette making machines. Over 31% of all cancer deaths today are due to smoking. Even more importantly, we are living longer. The majority of my patients were over 65 years of age and 90% were over age 50.
    The average life expectancy in the USA 100 years ago was 47 years.
    People did not live long enough to develop cancers prior to advances in antibiotic therapy to treat infectious disease which were the number one killers – tuberculosis especially. Note that lung cancer was a reportable disease in the latter 1800’s – it was so rare. Now with aging and decades of cigarette smoking we see that lung cancer is the number one cause of death for men and women.
    We have the means to avoid at least one third of cancer deaths, and yet 21-24% of people in the U.S. still smoke cigarettes. It is far better to prevent tobacco related cancer than try to treat them with chemotherapy. Of note is that tobacco related cancers are usually the most resistant malignancies to even our new and expensive chemotherapy treatments.

  2. Most cancer patients died. In some cases a surgeon would operate and remove the tumors, but the cancer would grow back or spread due to metastasis.
    Cancer is an ancient disease so there is a long history about it that you can read on the American Cancer Society page:
    the History of cancerhttp://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/conten…
    It really wasn’t until the US declared ‘war on cancer’ in 1971 that any progress was made in treating cancer. At least now with early detection and treatment there are now survivors of the disease.
    National Cancer Act of 1971http://www.dtp.nci.nih.gov/timeline/nofl…

  3. Sometimes surgery, more often they just died.

  4. Prayer and sometimes surgery

  5. They weren’t.

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