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supernatural and related to demons and sin and the accumulation of black bile.
    This menacing theory of cancer prevailed for nearly 2,000 years before it was exploded by Andreas Versalius, a Flemish doctor and anatomist working in Padua, Italy, in the early 16th century.
Versalius performed post-mortems on his patients, as well as dissecting the corpses of executed criminals supplied to him by a judge in Padua fascinated by his work: black bile, he announced, was
nowhere to be found in the human body, diseased or healthy.
    But it was another two centuries and more before anyone suggested that agents in our environment might be playing a part in the development of tumours. In 1761 John Hill, a London physician and
botanist, produced a paper, ‘Caution Against Immoderate Use of Snuff’, in which he described patients with tumours of the nasal passages as a consequence of sniffing tobacco. And in
1775 an English surgeon, Percivall Pott, reported a number of cases of cancer of the scrotum in unusually young men whose only link was that they had been chimney sweeps as small boys and were
likely to have gathered soot in the nooks and crannies of their bodies as they squeezed themselves up the narrow flues of homes and factories in Georgian Britain – a practice thatlasted for two centuries and frequently involved children as young as four years old. In 1779, the world’s first cancer hospital was set up in Reims, France – at a fair
distance from the city because people feared the disease was contagious.
    The foundation of our modern understanding of cancer as a disease of the cells was laid in the mid-19th century by Rudolf Virchow, a German doctor born into a farming family, who won a
scholarship to study medicine and chemistry at the Prussian Military Academy. Often referred to as the father of modern pathology, Virchow was much less interested in his suffering patients than in
what they suffered from – the mechanics of disease – and preferred to spend his time in the lab poring over his microscope and doing animal experiments than visiting the sick. The idea
that living cells arise from other living cells through division had been around for many decades but had been almost universally rejected, perhaps because it offended religious sensibilities about
creation – in those days people really believed that maggots appeared spontaneously in rotting meat.
    It was not until the strong and independent-minded Virchow, who was active in politics as well as in science and medicine, published his own observations of cell division and coined the phrase
omnis cellula e cellula
– which translates roughly as ‘all cells arise from other cells’ in a continuous process of generation – that the idea finally caught on.
But it was the advent of molecular biology in the mid-20th century that has allowed scientists to peer ever deeper into the cell – to study the machinery of life itself in the DNA – and
to begin to crack the code of cancer.

CHAPTER TWO
The Enemy Within
    In which we hear a) about a virus that causes cancer in chickens that can be passed on to other birds in the DNA and b) of the discovery of the first genes responsible for
     driving cancer – the so-called oncogenes.
    ***
    Now more ambitious questions arose . . . Might all cancers arise from the wayward action of genes? Can the complexities of human cancer be reduced to the chemical
     vocabulary of DNA?
    Michael Bishop
    At the cutting edge of research in the mid-1900s was the idea – incredibly controversial at the time because there was no direct evidence for it – that viruses
could cause cancer in humans. The central figure in this story is Peyton Rous, born a full century earlier in Texas, who studied medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and was very nearly lost to
science before he began. While still a student, Rous contracted tuberculosis from a cadaver he was dissecting when he cut his finger on a tuberculous bone. He had surgery to