Læknablaðið - 01.12.1978, Page 64

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LÆKNABLAÐIÐ
Tonight we honour the memory of a
remarkable man Niels Dungal who,
through his own work and that of his col-
laborators and pupils has made, from this
geographically small but intellectually
great island, a deep impression on patho-
logy the world over. I am very appreciative
of the honour done to me by the invitation
to deliver this Niels Dungal Lecture and I
propose to honour his memory by speaking
on one of his many interests, the epidemio-
logy of cancer and in particular of the in-
vestigations of my colleagues and myself
into some aspects of the community be-
haviour of Hodgkin’s Disease (H.D.) which
have occupied us in the last deeade. The
reason for so doing is that, to progress,
cancer epidemiology has got to move
into new fields or perhaps one should say
to revert to fields long inadequately culti-
vated, a task in which all members of the
medical profession have a part to play.
That cancer in the words of a classic
debate in the British parliament ,,has in-
qreased, is increasing and ought to be
diminished“ is a view long held by pro-
fession and public. As long ago as 1725, it
provoked enquiry in London and in the
middle of the Napoleonic wars, the London
Corresponding Committee issued its famous
questionnaire, one which reflected the
studies of Percival Pott on Scrotal Cancer
in chimney sweeps, a curiously variegated
geographical phenomenon which raised all
the problems we struggle with today, a
multifactorial cancer indeed but one in
which the decisive factor was long con-
tinued contact with soot from certain
chimneys and from certain coals only. But
as Professor Clemmesen3 has shown Pott
had been preceded in studies of specific
cancers by Rigoni Stern who in the mid
18th Century had studied breast and cervix
uterus cancers in nuns in Verona, Italy.
But while these three cancers could, with
a fair measure of certainty be identified,
years of work were necessary before dia-
gnosis became sufficiently specific for the
majority of individual cancers to be i-
dentified. Cancer epidemiology for nearly