In the 17th century palliative care was the most common approach to cancer. However, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and other, unorthodox, medical practitioners were keen to trial possible treatments such as invasive surgery, corrosive skin remedies, and regimented diets. To find a treatment, however, practitioners needed to understand the disease and how it developed. This led to various experiments, one of the most notorious of which was undertaken by surgeon Samuel Smith sometime in the first half of the 17th century.
Between the 17th and 19th centuries medical writers often referred to the story of Smith, a renowned surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. One of the earliest records of the case appeared in 1670, when the unnamed author of a medical treatise described how Smith had performed a mastectomy on ‘a large Cancerated Breast’. Afterwards, Smith had:
a Curiosity to taste the Juice, or Matter contain’d in one of the little Cystis’s or Glands of the same, which he did by Touching it with one of his Fingers, and then tasting it from the same with his Tongue.
Smith had decided to taste the cancerous matter, which:
immediately like a Gass, pierce[d] through the whole substance of his Tongue, and passed down his Throat not less sharp or biting than Oyl of Vitriol, Spirit of Nitre, or Aquae Fortis, or some vehement Catheretick, or Caustick Salt.
Despite quickly spitting it out, washing his mouth with water, and consuming a significant amount of wine, Smith:
could not get rid of the Taste thereof, but it continued with him, and brought him (who was a very strong man) into
a Consumption, or wasting pining Condition, attended with several other ill Symptoms.
After languishing for several months, Smith died, but not before reporting that the taste never left his tongue ‘to his dying Hour’:
the Taste of the Juice … he declared upon his Death-bed … to be the true and only Cause of his languishing Condition and Death.
Smith’s experiment, and subsequent affliction, feature in numerous medical texts. The case has recently attracted the attention of scholars working on the history of cancer. Alanna Skuse and Marjo Kaartinen both suggest Smith’s case aligned with the ‘poison model’ of cancer in the 17th and 18th centuries. Although never an orthodox theory, this model suggested that a substance akin to poison was responsible for the growth or ‘transmission’ of cancer. Yet, on his death bed, Smith felt it was the taste of the juice itself which led to his deterioration. Rather than suggesting that
he contracted cancer from ingesting anything, it was the ‘sensory’ experience that caused his eventual death.
In the early modern period, many medical practitioners and authors believed that emotional responses to intense sensory phenomena could make the body susceptible to illness or even spontaneously generate disease. During plagues, commentators often reported that sights, smells, and sounds associated with disease caused such intense fear that the observer’s body could become more vulnerable. Discussing the association between fear and plague in God’s terrible voice (1667), clergyman Thomas Vincent described people who had not yet contracted plague, who ‘some by the sight of a Coffin in the streets have fallen into a shivering, and immediatly the disease hath assaulted them’.
The same theory was applied to other diseases too, including cancer. In parts of Europe people believed that simply looking at the ulcerated sores on a cancer patient could cause the disease. As a result, cancer patients were often hidden away in their homes and refused entry to hospitals. Historian Michael Stolberg relays one such incident in Salzburg in 1784, when 82-year-old Elisabeth Siewaldin was admitted to a former leper’s hospital for an ulcerating cancer because ‘she is not only a horrible sight but also puts those who take care of her in danger of contagion’.
As time went by, other medical practitioners weighed in on how Smith might have met his demise. In 1711 surgeon William Beckett considered ‘Whether the Cancerous Juice is Corrosive, or not’. After recounting the original tale, Beckett confessed that:
when I receiv’d this Account it did not a little surprise me, because I had several times had the Curiosity to do the very same Thing, at the Hospital where that unfortunate Gentleman made the Experiment.
Beckett ‘never found any remarkable Sharpness in it, tho’ ‘twas always attended with a very unpleasant Savour’. Unconvinced that cancerous bodily fluids had corrosive qualities, Beckett instead argued Smith’s death was:
only accountable from the extraordinary Stench and Malignity of the Matter, which impressing its Virulency on the Animal Juices must undoubtedly disturb their regular Motions, and cause the utmost Confusion of the whole Æconomy.
Beckett’s explanation was more technical than earlier accounts, but he was convinced that the intense visceral reaction caused by the taste played a part in Smith’s ordeal.
By the 19th century, beliefs that sensory phenomena could induce illness were beginning to wane, though they were not entirely dismissed. Surgeon Samuel Young was somewhat convinced by the argument that Smith succumbed to the foul taste of the cancer.
He wrote in 1818:
Another point of view in which this case may be considered, (if a highly stimulating and nauseous quality is allowed to cancerous matter) is that of its being an instance of the perversion of the sense of taste, from a violent impression upon the nerves of the tongue.
However, Young concluded that ‘the supposition … of “bad taste”, is not supported by the concurrence of those unfortunate people who labour under the disease of Cancer in the mouth’. Young’s scrutiny does suggest that the senses remained influential in how people navigated experiences of disease some 200 years after the first reference to Smith.
Young’s treatise was one of the last texts to mention Smith, marking the end of the debate on the role of the senses in the spread of cancer. It would be another 100 years before theories of cancer’s contagion were finally debunked. As cancer entered hospitals, medical interventions, such as radiotherapy in the 1890s, chemotherapy in the 1940s, and new surgical techniques, meant that cancer became easier to understand and manage.
Claire Turner is Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities at Durham University.