Exquisite and Lingering Pains: Facing Cancer in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

In 1781, José Flores, a medical doctor and Professor of Medicine at the University in Guatemala, published a small booklet on a new specific remedy for the cure of cancer.² This disease, already known to the ancient Egyptians, and described and named by Hippocrates, was very well known in the eighteenth century, despite its relatively low incidence.³ Although according to Gaspard-Laurent Bayle, a medical doctor of the Charité Hospital, one out of seven patients who entered the Paris hospitals at the end of the eighteenth century died as a consequence of a form of this disease, other sources refer to a death rate of no more than 2 per cent at the end of the eighteenth century and around 2.4 per cent in 1840.⁴ At the beginning of the twentieth century, the incidence of cancer reached a figure between 3 and 5 per cent, far away from tuberculosis, the cause of death of about 36 per cent of population.⁵ At the time of the publication of José Flores’ booklet, many doctors shared the impression that cancer, a deadly though relatively rare disease, was becoming increasingly frequent.⁶