Cancer has afflicted humanity from pre-historic times, though its prevalence has markedly increased in recent decades in unison with rapidly aging populations and, in the last half-century, increasingly risky health behavior in the general population and the increased presence of carcinogens in consumer products and in the environment. The oldest credible evidence of cancer in mammals consists of tumor masses found in fossilized dinosaurs and human bones from pre-historic times. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of cancer in dinosaurs emanates from a recent large-scale study that screened by fluoroscopy more than 10,000 specimens of dinosaur vertebrae for evidence of tumors and assessed abnormal vertebrae by computerized tomography (CT) [27]. Of the various species of dinosaurs surveyed, only cretaceous hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) that lived approximately 70 Ma ago exhibited tumors, and although most were benign (hemangiomas,¹ desmoplastic fibromas,² and osteoblastomas³), malignant metastatic cancers also were detected in 0.2 % of specimens tested.

The earliest written record of what is generally agreed to have been human cancer appeared in ancient Egyptian manuscripts discovered in the nineteenth century, especially the Edwin Smith and George Ebers papyri that describe surgical, pharmacological, and magical treatments. They were written between 1500 and 1600 BCE, possibly based on material from thousands of years earlier. The Smith papyrus, possibly written by the physician-architect Imhotep, who designed and built the step pyramid at Sakkara in the thirtieth century BCE under Pharaoh Djoser, is believed to contain the first reference to breast cancer (case 45) when referring to tumors of the anterior chest. It postulates that when such tumors are cool to touch, bulging, and have spread over the breast, no treatment can succeed [28]. It also provides the earliest mention of suturing wounds and using a “fire drill” to cauterize open wounds. In ancient times, gods were thought to preside over human destiny, including health and disease, medicine and religion were intertwined and practiced by priests and sages, and famous physicians were thought to be gods’ intermediaries. For instance, in case 1 of the Edwin Smith papyrus, physicians are called “lay-priests of Sekhmet.” Sekhmet, the feared lion-headed “lady of terror” and one of the oldest Egyptian deities, was known as the “lady of life” patron of physicians and healers [29].

The earliest cancerous growths in humans were found in Egyptian and Peruvian mummies dating back to approximately 1500 BC. The oldest scientifically documented case of disseminated cancer was that of a 40–50 year-old Scythian king who lived in the steppes of Southern Siberia approximately 2,700 years ago. Modern microscopic and proteomic techniques confirmed the cancerous nature of the lesions throughout his entire skeleton and their prostatic origin [30]. Half a millennium later and half a world away, a Ptolemaic Egyptian was dying of cancer [31]. Digital radiography and multi-detector CT scans of his mummy, kept at the Museu Nacional de Arqueología in Lisbon, determined that his cancer was disseminated. The morphology and distribution of his lesions (spine, pelvis, and proximal extremities), and the mummy’s gender and age favor prostate as the most likely origin.

Following the decline of Egypt, Greek and Roman medicine became preeminent, especially with Hippocrates of Kos (460–c.360 BC), an island off the coast of Turkey, and Claudius Galenus (AD 129–c.216), better known as Galen of Pergamum (modern-day Bergama, Turkey). Their writings, describing their life-long experience and observations, became the foundation and repository of medical knowledge for the ensuing 1,500 years.

Although little is known with certainty about who he was, what he thought and wrote, and how he practiced medicine, the image we now have of Hippocrates emerged in the sixteenth century after “…[being] constantly invented and reinvented; constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed; molded and remolded, according to the cultural, philosophical, social, and political context, or the private and moral background” [32]. According to that image, Hippocrates emerged from a group of illustrious teachers at the famed medical school in the island of Kos in the Aegean Sea, during the Age of Pericles. As a seat of learning and the provincial seat of the museum of Alexandria, Kos was an educational center and a playground for the princes of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Its market place was one of the largest in the ancient world and its well-fortified port gave it prominence in Aegean trade. Much of what we know about Hippocrates we owe to Soranus of Ephesus (a second century AD Greek physician), his first biographer, and to Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC), who mentions him in his writings as The Great Hippocrates. The medical legacy associated with Hippocrates’ name and the imagery it conjures up have become legendary. Hippocrates is called the Father of Medicine more for rejecting prevailing views on the supernatural causes of disease and their cure through rituals and offerings, for promoting a rational approach to medicine, and for his famous Oath, than for the so-called Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of 60 “books”⁴ of medical writings on a variety of medical topics, including “On air, water, and places”, “On ancient medicine”, “On epidemics”, “On surgery”, “On the sacred disease”, “On ulcers”, “On fractures”, “On Hemorrhoids”, “Aphorisms” [33], “The oath”, and many others of which he might have written only 12–14, according to scholars’ best estimates (Fig. 2.1). The Hippocratic Oath, sworn upon a number of healing gods, required new physicians to be trained and to uphold a number of professional ethical standards. Today, few medical schools adhere to this ancient rite of passage. The Oath:

I swear by Apollo the physician, Asclepius, Hygieia, Panacea, and all the gods and goddesses as my witnesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this contract:

1.

To hold him who taught me this art equally dear to me as my parents, to make my teacher a partner in life, and to fulfill his needs when required; to look upon his offspring as equals to my own siblings, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or contract; and that by the set rules, lectures, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to students bound by this contract and having sworn this Oath to the law of medicine, but to no others.

 

2.

I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.

 

3.

I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.

 

4.

In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.

 

5.

I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.

 

6.

Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.

 

7.

Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I will keep secret, as considering all such things to be private.

 

8.

So long as I maintain this Oath faithfully and without corruption, may it be granted to me to partake of life fully and the practice of my art, gaining the respect of all men for all time. However, should I transgress this Oath and violate it, may the opposite be my fate [34].

 

The Hippocratic Oath is remarkable for it promotes both a system of accreditation requiring a period of apprenticeship and an ethical professional code of conduct that differentiate knowledgeable and trustworthy physicians from improvised healers, whether this was intended or not.

Hippocrates’ approach to diagnosing diseases was based on careful observations of patients and on monitoring their symptoms. For instance, in “On forecasting diseases”, he advises,

First of all the doctor should look at the patient’s face. If he looks his usual self this is a good sign. If not, however, the following are bad signs – sharp nose, hollow eyes, cold ears, dry skin on the forehead, strange face color such as green, black, red or lead colored. If the face is like this at the beginning of the illness, the doctor must ask the patient if he has lost sleep, or had diarrhea, or not eaten [35].

In his book “On epidemics”, he advises to record patients’ symptoms and appearance on a day-to day-basis in order to forecast disease progression or recovery. He believed that health resulted from the balance and disease from the imbalance in the main four body fluids or humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, each originating in a different organ and each corresponding to a personal temperament, a physical earthly element, and a specific season (Table 2.1). However, while Hippocrates subscribed to the theory that was later adopted by Greek, Roman, and Muslim physicians, its true origins are controversial.

The relative dominance of one of the humors determined personality traits and their imbalance resulted in a propensity toward certain diseases. Thus, the aim of treatment was to restore balance through diet, exercise, and the judicious use of herbs, oils, earthly compounds, and occasionally heavy metals or surgery. For instance, a phlegmatic or lethargic individual (one with too much phlegm) could be restored to balance by administering citrus fruit thought to counter phlegm. The Hippocratic Corpus deals at length with diseases that produced masses (onkos), and coined the word karkinos to describe ulcerating and non-healing lumps that in retrospect included lesions ranging from benign processes to malignant tumors. He advocated diet, rest, and exercise for mild illnesses, followed by purgatives, heavy metals and surgery for more serious diseases, especially karkinomas. His stepwise treatment approach is summarized in one of his Aphorisms, “That which medicine does not heal, the knife frequently heals; and what the knife does not heal, actual cautery often heals; but when all these fail, the disease is incurable” [36]. To his credit, he recognized the relentless progression of deep-seated karkinomas and the often-negative effect of treatment when he wrote: “Occult cancers should not be molested. Attempting to treat them, they quickly become fatal. When unmolested, they remain in a dormant state for a length of time” (Aphorism 38 [37]). Hippocrates died at Larissa, in Thessaly, at the probable age of 100.

Aulus Cornelius Celsus (25 BC–50 AD), a Roman physician and one of Hippocrates’ most prominent successors, also held the view that “the excised carcinomas have returned and caused death” [38]. He described the evolution of tumors from cacoethes followed by carcinos (which he later called carcinomas) without ulceration, then fungated ulcers and is credited as the first to have performed reconstruction surgery following excision of cancer [39]. Celsus believed that cacoethes were treatable by surgical resection, whereas more advanced lesions were unresponsive and should be left alone. He wrote,

It is only the cacoethes which can be removed; the other stages are irritated by treatment; and the more so the more vigorous it is. Some have used caustic medicaments, some the cautery, some excision with a scalpel; but no medicament has ever given relief; the parts cauterized are excited immediately to an increase until they cause death [40].

Yet, he acknowledged that only time could differentiate the stage of a particular tumor,

No one, however, except by time and experiment, can have the skill to distinguish a cacoethes which admits of being treated from a carcinoma which does not [41].

He vividly described the invasive nature of advanced cancer,

This also is a spreading disease. And all these signs often extend, and there results from them an ulcer which the Greeks call phagedaena, because it spreads rapidly and penetrates down to the bones and so devours the flesh [42].

Archigenes of Apamea, Syria (75–129 AD), who practiced in Rome in the time of Trajan, also stressed the importance of early stage diagnosis when various remedies can be successful but advised surgery for advanced cancer as absolutely necessary but only in strong patients able to cope with the harshness of the operation, warning, “if it has taken anything into its claws it cannot be easily ripped away.” However, Hippocrates’ most prominent successor and the one who propelled his legacy for nearly 15 centuries was Galen.

Galen was born of Greek parents in Pergamum, the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Pergamum during the Hellenistic period, under the Attalid dynasty (281–133 BC). In Galen’s time, Pergamum was a thriving cultural center famous for its library second only to Alexandria’s and its statue of Asclepius (Aesculapius in Latin), the Greek god of medicine and healing. His prosperous patrician architect father, Aelius Nicon, oversaw Galen’s broad and eclectic education, which included mathematics, grammar, logic, and inquiry into the four major schools of philosophy of the time: the Platonists, the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans. He started medical studies in Smyrna and Corinth at age 16 and later lived in Alexandria for 5 years (152–157 AD), where he studied anatomy and was exposed to the practice of autopsy as a means to understanding health and disease. Years later he wrote, “look at the human skeleton with your own eyes. This is very easy in Alexandria, so that the physicians of that area instruct their pupils with the aid of autopsy” [43]. In 157 AD, his appointment as physician of the gymnasium attached to the Asclepius sanctuary of Pergamum brought him back to his hometown, where he became surgeon to local gladiators. When civil unrest broke out, Galen moved to Rome, where his talents and ambition soon brought him fame but also numerous enemies that forced him to flee the city in 166, the year the plague (presumably smallpox) struck. Two years later, Roman Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus recalled him to serve as army surgeon during an outbreak among troops stationed at Aquileia (168–169), and when the plague extended to Rome, he was named personal physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus, adding luster and fame to his fast rising career. While medical practitioners of the time disagreed on whether experience or established theories should guide treatment, Galen applied Aristotelian empiricism by ensuring that established theories gave meaning to personal observations and relied on logic to sort out uncertainties and discover medical truths. He viewed himself as the best interpreter of Hippocratic thought. His pioneering anatomical studies, based on dissecting pigs and primates, were only surpassed by Andreas Vesalius’ pivotal 1543-work De humani corporis fabrica that described and illustrated human dissections. He was the first to recognize the difference between arterial (bright) and venous (dark) blood, which he postulated to be distinct systems originating from the heart and liver, respectively. He used vivisections to study body functions. For instance, when he cut the laryngeal nerve of a pig, the animal stopped squealing; this nerve is now known as Galen’s Nerve. Likewise, he showed that urine came from kidneys by tying the ureters, and that severing spinal cord nerves caused paralysis. He performed audacious and delicate operations, such as removal of the lens to treat cataracts, an operation that would become commonplace only 2,000 years later. Galen’s prolific writings include 300 titles, of which approximately half have survived wholly or in part. Many were destroyed in the fire of the Temple of Peace (AD 191). In On My Own Books, Galen himself indicated which of the many works circulating under his name was genuine, though “several indisputably genuine texts fail to appear in them, either because they were written later, or because for whatever reason Galen chose to disown them” [44].

The influence of Galen’s work in the west went into decline after the collapse of the Roman Empire, for no Latin translations were available and few scholars could read Greek, but Greek medical tradition remained alive and well in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. This is because interest in Greek science and medicine by Arab Muslims during the Abbasid period led to translations of Galen’s work into Arabic, many of them by Syrian Christian scholars. The need to be fluent in Greek or Arabic limited the number of later scholars capable of translating Galen’s work into modern languages. Perhaps the most complete and authoritative compendium of Galen’s work is the one compiled by Karl Gottlob Kühn of Leipzig between 1821 and 1833. It assembled 122 of Galen’s works into 22 volumes (20,000 pages in length), translated from the original Greek into Latin and published in both languages. In addition to contributing to understanding anatomy, physiology, pathology, neurology, pharmacology, and other disciplines, Galen bridged the Greek and Roman medical worlds by enshrining Hippocratic principles and his own as the foundation of all medical knowledge that lasted through the Middle Ages. Indeed, many of the later medical scholars, teachers, and practitioners referred to Galen as the source of all medical knowledge, including Oribasius of Pergamum, Aëtius of Amidenus, Alexander of Tralles, and Paulus Ægineta. Professor Vivian Nutton, a renowned Galen expert, called him, “The most prolific writer to survive from the ancient world, whose combination of great learning and practical skill imposed his ideas on learned doctors for centuries” [45]. With respect to cancer, Galen addressed tumors of various types and origins, distinguishing onkoi (lumps or masses in general), karkinos (including malignant ulcers), and karkinomas (including non-ulcerating cancers) [46]. His greatest contribution to advancing our understanding of cancer was the classification that graded lumps and growths into three categories ranging from the most benign to the most malignant. The De tumoribus secondum naturam (tumors according to nature) included benign lumps and physiologic processes, such as the growth of breasts during puberty, or even a pregnant uterus. De tumoribus supra naturam (tumors beyond nature) comprised processes such as abscesses and swelling from inflammation he compared to a “soaking-wet sponge” for “if the inflamed part is cut, a large quantity of blood can be seen flowing out”. Not surprisingly, bloodletting was the preferred treatment of these conditions. De tumoribus praeter naturam (tumors beyond nature) included lesions considered cancer today. Galen’s classification of lumps and growths is the first and only written document of antiquity devoted exclusively to tumors both cancerous and non-cancerous. Not surprisingly, despite his decisive role in shaping Greek medical tradition and his influence on medical practice lasting nearly 1,500 years, Galen’s original contributions to understanding and treating cancer were essentially nil. He died in Rome at the probable age of 87 [47].

With the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization after the fall of Rome in 476 AD, medical knowledge in the Western Roman Empire stagnated and many ancient medical writings were lost. Nevertheless, prominent physician-scholars emerged during the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire by the end of the fourth century, including Oribasius of Pergamum (325–403), Aëtius of Amidenus (502–575), and Paulus Ægineta (625?–690?), all of whom wrote about cancer. Oribasius stressed the painful nature of cancer and described cancers of the face, breast, and genitalia. Aëtius is attributed the observation that swollen blood vessels around breast cancer often look like crab legs; hence the term cancroid (resembling a crab). He believed that surgery for uterine cancer was too risky but advocated that approach for more accessible cancers, such as breast. In his writings, he upheld observations on breast cancer made by Leonides of Alexandria (second century AD),

Breast cancer appears mainly in women and rarely in men. The tumor is painful because of the intense traction of the nipple…[avoid operating when] the tumor has taken over the entire breast and adhered to the thorax…[but] if the scirrhous tumor begins at the edge of the breast and spreads in more than half of it, we must try to amputate the breast without cauterization [48].

A century later, Paulus Ægineta published seven books he described as a treatise that,

Contain[s] the description, causes, and cure of all diseases, whether situated in parts of uniform texture, in particular organs, or consisting of solutions of continuity, and that not merely in a summary way, but at as great length as possible [49].

In book IV, section 26, he states that cancer “occurs in every part of the body…but it is more particularly frequent in the breasts of women…”. In book VI, section 45, he quotes Galen’s surgical treatment for breast cancer, which he advocates as the treatment of choice for all operable cancers,

If ever you attempt to cure cancer by an operation, begin your evacuations by purging the melancholic humor, and having cut away the whole affected part, so that a root of it be left, permit the blood to be discharged, and to not speedily restrain it, but squeeze the surrounding veins so as to force out the thick part of the blood, and then cure the wound like other ulcers [50].

He called attention to the presence of lymph nodes in the armpits of women with breast cancer and advocated poppy extracts to combat pain. Although these authors and their contemporaries contributed little to our knowledge of medicine and cancer, through their writings, they ensured the preservation of Greek-Roman medical tradition accumulated by their predecessors. Paulus Ægineta clearly acknowledges its dominance over medical practice of his time in the introduction of the preface to his seven books,

It is not because the more ancient writers had omitted anything relative to the Art that I have composed this work, but in order to give a compendious course of instructions; for, on the contrary, everything is handed by them properly, and without any omissions…[51].

Greek scientific tradition spread widely, first through Christian Syriac writers, scholars, and scientists reaching Arab lands mainly via translations of Greek texts into Arabic by “Nestorians” [52]. Followers of Nestorius, Patriarchy of Constantinople, Nestorians’ teachings were eventually condemned as heretical at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD). Nestorianism spread throughout Asia Minor through churches, monasteries, and schools where Nestorian monks came into close contact with Arabs. Pivotal to the adoption of Greek thought by the Arabs was the pro-Greek penchant of Ja’far Ibn Barmak, minister of the Caliph of Bagdad, along with like-minded members of the Caliph’s entourage. “Thus the Nestorian heritage of Greek scholarship passed from Edessa and Nisibis, through Jundi-Shapur, to Baghdad” [53] Islamic physician-scholars and medical writers became preeminent in the early middle Ages, including the illustrious and influential Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Sazariya Razi, also known as Rhazes (865?–925?), Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā, known as Avicenna (980–1037), Abū-Marwān ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Zuhr or Avenzoar (1094–1162), and Ala-al-din abu Al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi known as Ibn Al-Nafis (1213–1288). The latter described the pulmonary circulation in great detail and accuracy, as told in Commentary on the Anatomy of Canon of Avicenna, a manuscript discovered in the Prussian State Library of Berlin. Ibn Al-Nafis stated,

The blood from the right chamber of the heart must arrive at the left chamber but there is no direct pathway between them. The thick septum of the heart is not perforated and does not have visible pores as some people thought or invisible pores as Galen thought. The blood from the right chamber must flow through the vena arteriosa (pulmonary artery) to the lungs, spread through its substances, be mingled there with air, pass through the arteria venosa (pulmonary vein) to reach the left chamber of the heart and there form the vital spirit… [54].

He also understood the anatomy of the lungs explaining,

The lungs are composed of parts, one of which is the bronchi; the second, the branches of the arteria venosa; and the third, the branches of the vena arteriosa, all of them connected by loose porous flesh [55].

And he was the first to describe the coronary circulation and its function, “The nourishment of the heart is through the vessels that permeate the body of the heart” [56].

Of greatest interest to us is Avenzoar, who first described the symptoms of esophageal and stomach cancer in his book Kitab al-Taysir, and proposed feeding enemas to keep alive patients with stomach cancer [57], a treatment approach unsuccessfully attempted by his predecessors. He insisted that the surgeon-to-be receive hands-on training before being allowed to operate on his own. By the end of the fourteenth century, Avenzoar had become well-known in university circles at Padua, Bologna, and Montpellier where he was considered one of the greatest physicians of all time. Successive publications of his Kitab al-Taysir and of translations ensured his influence through the seventeenth century when Paracelsus’ new treatment paradigm emphasizing chemical ingredients rather than herbs, disseminated in the vernacular rather than in Greek or Latin, set in motion the decline of Greco-Roman medical tradition. In the meantime, the Mongolian capture and sacking of Bagdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, in 1258, and the defeat of the Emirate of Granada in 1492 by Isabel “The Catholic”, Queen of Castile and León and her husband Ferdinand II of Aragón, completing the centuries-long recapture of the Iberian Peninsula from the Arabs, marked the decline of the Islamic world that accelerated the demise of traditional Hippocratic and Galenic medicine.

Meanwhile, new religious fervor, especially in Christian France, and the early success of the crusades contributed to the proliferation of Christian monasteries and health centers across Europe becoming the repositories of Greek medicine where monks copied ancient manuscripts and attended the sick, as Nestorian monks had done centuries earlier, giving rise to a network of hospitiums ⁵ throughout Western Europe that,

Flourished during the times of the Christian crusades and pilgrimages that were found mostly in monasteries where monks extended care to the sick and dying, but also to the hungry and weary on their way to the Holy Land, Rome, or other holy places, as well as to the woman in labor, the needy poor, the orphan, and the leper on their journey through life [58].

Perhaps the most famous Hospitium was the ninth century Studium of Salerno, a coastal town in southern Italy, key to trade with Sicily and other Mediterranean towns. Although this humble dispensary was initially sustained by the needs of thousands of pilgrims en route to the Holy Land, the Studium soon became the first formal association of physicians that eventually grew into the Schola Medica Salernitana. Fostered by its Greek past, the dispensary and the town rose in fame with the arrival at a nearby abbey in 1060 of Constantine Africanus, a Benedictine monk and native of Carthage whose medical guide for travelers titled Viaticum and his translations and annotations of Greek and Arabic texts led Salerno to be known as Hippocratica Civitas (Hippocrates Town). By the end of the eleventh century, the fame of the Studium had spread across Europe thanks to the erudition of its teachers and scholars, women as well as men, and of their writings still anchored in the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition. Prominent and best known medical writings arising from the Studium in that period include the Breviary on the Signs, Causes, and Cures of Diseases by Joannes de Sancto Paulo, the Liber de Simplici Medicina by Johannes and Matthaeus Plantearius, and De Passionibus Mulierum Curandorum, a compilation of women’s health issues attributed to Trotula, the most famous female physician of her time. Given its widespread fame and its eclectic teaching merging Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Arab medical traditions, the Studium became a Mecca for students, teachers, and scholars between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. And although the Studium had little direct impact on the progress of medicine, it is noteworthy mainly as the precursor of the Schola Medica Salernitana, the first university of medicine in the world, and as a model for the greatly influential and enduring pre-Renaissance medical schools at Montpellier (1150), Bologna (1158), and Paris (1208) that through local and relocated scholars became European meccas for the study and practice of medicine.

The early-Renaissance period witnessed a revival of interest in Greek culture fostered by the arrival in Western Europe of many Greek scholars who fled Constantinople after the Turks conquered Byzantium in 1453, thus enabling western scholars to abandon Arabic translations of the Greek masters. This and other transcendental events of that time, such as the invention of the printing press, the discovery of America, and the Reformation, brought about a change in direction and outlook; a desire to escape the boundaries of the past and an eagerness to explore new horizons. This inquisitiveness was broad-based, encompassing all areas of human knowledge and endeavor from the study of anatomy to the scrutiny of the skies that culminated in the publication of two revolutionary and immensely influential treatises of that period: “De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum” (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) [59] by Andreas Vessalius (1514–1564), and “ De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) [60]. Likewise, progress was made in surgical techniques and treatment of wounds, thanks to Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), surgeon to the French Armies, private physician to three Kings of France and the father of modern surgery and forensic pathology, whose extensive experience on the battlefields of France’s Armies and ingenious prostheses reduced surgical mortality and accelerated rehabilitation [61]. He is said to have turned butchery into humane surgery. However, this burst of Renaissance knowledge did not extend to cancer, leading Paré to call all cancers Noli me tangere (do not touch me) and to declare, “Any kind of cancer is almost incurable and…[if operated]…heals with great difficulty” [62].