Fighting cancer - the early years

It is almost... as hard as finding some agent that will dissolve away the left ear... yet leave the right ear unharmed: so slight is the difference between the cancer cell and its normal ancestor.¹ 

This was a view expressed in 1945 reflecting on the apparent incurability of cancer. It reiterates the view of Bernard Peyrilhe, a French chemist who was renowned for his pioneering experimental work into cancer. In 1776 Peyrilhe said that it was absurd even to look for a chemical agent that might differentiate between normal and malignant tissue: any agent damaging one, he said, was bound to damage the other.  

There is, however, a long history of attempts to treat cancer with chemicals. The earliest is probably to be found in the Ebers papyrus  of 1500 BC, which advocated using arsenical ointments to treat ulcerating, presumptively cancerous, lesions. Some later, allegedly highly successful, treatments are listed in Table 1.²  Their failure to stand the test of time indicates that, at best, the optimism of their proponents was unfounded.