Shocking History

The

of
 INTRODUCTION
Today, the surgical removal of a tumor is widely accepted by the public as beneficial
and necessary.

Yet it wasn’t long ago that the prevailing public attitude towards tumor resection (and
other cancer treatments used today) was so disapproving and hostile that it can be
difficult for people to imagine.

The great 15th century renaissance physician Paracelsus once wrote,

“It should be forbidden and severely punished

to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery
and other fiendish tortures.”
 Public attitudes towards Cancer Surgery

Disapproving Accepted as
and Hostile Normal

1500 2020

What happened?

1. Loss of Common Sense

2. Lack of knowledge
 Reason #1: Loss of Common Sense

Common
sense

1500 2020
Year
When was the last time you were cut with a
knife and it made you healthier?
A few years ago I accidentally cut my
finger while trying to pry apart two frozen
chicken breasts with a kitchen knife.
Horrible idea, I know.

Anyway, the knife ended up slicing into

my finger causing some bleeding and
leaving a piece of skin hanging.

I thought I might have needed stitches so

I went to the hospital, and ended up
sitting in the waiting room for 4 hours,
thanks to Canada’s horrendous socialist
medical system.

When I finally received medical attention,

all they did was give me a bandaid for my
finger and sent me on my way. Waste of
time!

After the knife cut me I was in much worse health

unhealthy cutting? healthy cutting?
 Reason #2: Lack of knowledge
Did you know?

In the 1960s, a surgeon named Walter Freeman crisscrossed the United States performing the “Icepick
lobotomy” on mental health patients in what he called “The lobotomobile.”

The Icepick Lobotomy

A procedure in which an icepick-like instrument is inserted underneath the orbital bone just above
the eyeball and in a quick scrambling motion, tissues in the prefrontal lobes of the brain are
severed.

Finally in 1967, after performing 50,000 lobotomies and causing a brain hemorrhage that ended up
killing a patient, the egomaniacal butcher Freeman was banned from performing the procedure.
 history of cancer surgery
The rapid rise of cancer surgery is best illustrated by the early history of what is now
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, according to Dr. Ralph Moss in
his book The Cancer Industry.

The spiritual founder of Memorial Sloan-

Kettering was a famous 19th century
“women’s doctor,” J. Marion Sims. Sims
received only a brief medical training before
turning his hand to surgery. Looking to
extend the boundaries of surgery, Sims
gathered a group of slave women, upon
whom he performed experimental operations
in a kind of makeshift hospital behind his
house.

Some of these women received as many as

thirty operations in a four-year period.
According to his sympathetic biographer,
these operations were said to be “little short of J. Marion Sims
murderous.”
 history of cancer surgery
Sims then moved to New York City where
he founded Women’s Hospital, which still
exists to this day. He continued
performing surgeries on large numbers of
women, many of whom were recent
European immigrants and he even
developed a select clientelle of wealthy
ladies.

According to Moss, The Lady Managers

(trustees) of the hospital became
convinced that “the lives of all the patients
in the institution were bring threatened
by… mysterious experiments.” Sims was
expelled from the hospital, but was later
reinstated to his position.

In 1884, Sims went on to establish the first private cancer hospital in the United States,
The New York Cancer Hospital, known today as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center. Sims was to become the first director of the hospital, but died before he had a
chance to fulfill this goal.
“public enemy number one is the profit-before-patient
ethos of the medical industry.”
- Dr. Richard Ablin
 The profit-before-patient ethos
Facts: Implications:
• A surgeon gets paid to cut people; if
he doesn’t perform any surgeries, You cannot trust a surgeon
he can’t pay the bills.

• The more procedures a surgeon

Overtreatment
performs, the more money she
makes.

• The more extreme the surgery

Excessive butchering
and the more cuts involved, the
more money the surgeon makes.
 Excessive Butchering

1. The Commando
2. The Whipple
3. Total Exenteration
4. Hemicorporectomy
 The Commando
The Commando was performed on patients for tongue cancer and involved the
removal of a patient’s entire mandible, or jaw.

According to one surgeon, The Commando

“derived its wide acceptance and popularity from the fact that it brought to
mind the slashing attack of the World War I commandos.”
(Crile, 1974)
 The whipple
The Whipple was a procedure for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, developed by
president of the American Surgical Association and clinical director at Memorial
Hospital, Dr. Allen Oldfather Whipple.

This surgery involved the removal of many organs adjacent to the affected gland,
on the theory that they might be harboring nests of cancer cells.
(NCI, 1976)
 Total Exenteration
In 1948, Dr. Alexander Brunschwig from Memorial Hospital invented an operation called
Total Exenteration, which involved the removal of:

• The rectum • The pelvic floor and wall

• The stomach • The pancreas
• The bladder • The spleen
• Part of the liver • The colon
• The ureter • Many blood vessels
• All internal reproductive organs

Brunschwig himself called the operation,

“A brutal and cruel procedure”

(New York Times, April 8, 1969).
 The hemicorporectomy
The ultimate operation was the
hemicorporectomy, which was literally,
the removal of half the body.

The hemicorporectomy was developed

for the treatment of bladder or pelvic
malignancy by Theodore Miller, another
Memorial Hospital Surgeon, and
involved the amputation of everything
below the pelvis.

Many patients chose death over

submitting to Miller’s operation.
(New York Times, November 30, 1969)
all of those surgeries are still being
performed to this day
 A Message From Surgeon Dr Ian Harris
In 2018 I had the pleasure of interviewing Australian Surgeon Dr. Ian Harris, author of the book
Surgery: The Ultimate Placebo. At the end of the interview, I asked him his most important
message that he’d like everybody in the world to know, and he said:

“The effectiveness of medicine is overestimated by those who are making the decisions
and the harms are underestimated. The doctors that sell are overestimating the benefits
and underestimating the harms. The way to correct that is to make doctors be more
scientific about what they do, and also to educate the public to be more scientific about
what they will have done to them. Don’t be afraid to look up the evidence. Ask your doctor
questions. The simplest question of all, and it sounds dumb but so many unnecessary
procedures could’ve been saved by asking this single question:

Always Ask Your Doctor

“What evidence do you have that doing this procedure to me
is better than not doing it to me?”
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