Two Hundred Years of Cancer Research

Abstract

In the 200 years since the New England Journal of Medicine was founded, cancer has gone from a black box to a blueprint. During the first century of the Journal's publication, medical practitioners could observe tumors, weigh them, and measure them but had few tools to examine the workings within the cancer cell. A few astute observers were ahead of their time, including Rudolf Virchow, who with the benefit of a microscope deduced the cellular origin of cancer in 1863,(1) and Stephen Paget, who in 1889 wisely mused about the seed-and-soil hypothesis of metastatic disease,(2) a theory that is ...