Cancer diagnosis and treatment in the early modern era

You've probably already seen this but just in case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer

According to that the only treatment that had a slightest chance of working was surgery. And that very often didn't due to the usual problems with hygiene and secondary infection. So cancer was definitely known about. But usually regarded as a death sentence, I think. I'm not sure anyone would really bother with trying to treat it.

In the late 17th century pretty much all diseases were treated by purging and/or bloodletting - that was standard of care at the time. Some diseases had additional treatments too, like mercury or Jesuit's bark (quinine) - there was quite a bit of pharmaceutical lore & experimentation going on, very little of it actually beneficial though not all of it actively harmful. And none of it the least useful for a cancer patient except for the ones involving opiates (many physicians and pharmacists had their own recipes for "laudanum," it wasn't at all a standardized potion yet).

I believe that unless the tumor becomes palpable or visible in some way, definitive diagnosis would have been impossible. Any kind of treatment, by any kind of practitioner, would have been around symptoms, not causes. Surgery might conceivably have been an option once the tumor was identified, if a particularly brave or foolhardy surgeon was involved -- but the conditions of surgery at the time were so horrific, and the chances that it might succeed were so imperceptibly slight (even if "success" were defined as "the patient survived the operation a few days") that it's doubtful anyone would have gone through with it.

Breast cancers might be diagnosed somewhat earlier than cervical, but again mostly when the tumor was quite large. And surgery was more likely to be offered, but not much more likely to be survivable. (The well known writer Fanny Burney endured a mastectomy at the hands of Napoleon's surgeon in 1811 and lived to tell of it -- but that was a exceptional case, and she had the best surgeon available at a time when surgical & medical techniques were a bit better than they had been in your period.)

If you want your character to suffer from cervical cancer, I'm not sure the medical personnel of the day would even recognize it as a malignancy. Chances are they'd call it bleeding from the womb (this is one of its later symptoms) and from what I've read, physicians lumped all female bleeding in pretty much the same category of illness. Of course, in late-stage cancer the patient "looks malignant" -- often their skin tone changes and they lose quite a bit of weight.

Amen!

autumnleaf said:

Thanks for the replies. Essentially, I need this character to die, and I also need a reason for her daughter to delay in eloping with the man she loves; a terminally ill mother would give her a very sympathetic reason to delay, and the "mercy killing" dilemma is going to increase the tension and guilt.

Click to expand...

If all you need is to have a dying mother in the picture, you probably don't need to delve deeply into the medical details of her case.

--- In the absence of lab tests, imaging, & modern theories of disease, 17c diagnoses had to be based purely on observable signs & symptoms. Doctors could only guess at what was causing the symptoms, and they tended to lump things together in very different categories than we do today because they had no way to identify what might really be happening inside the body, much less explain it or treat it. A lot of things we consider completely distinct & unrelated were poorly differentiated, if at all, because they mostly looked the same from the outside.

--- If you look at documents from the period, you find that people's ailments & maladies (& everyone seemed to have a lot of them, all the time) often present in ways that don't really map neatly to our modern experience of health & illness. Except for some well-defined diseases like smallpox, malaria, and gout, it's often difficult even for people familiar with medical matters to determine, from an account of 17c illness, just what was going on with the person.

So pretty much you can pick any set of symptoms you want Dying Mom to suffer from, and ratchet up your character's angst as you need, without too much need for detailed medical research. Period diaries, letters and memoirs will give you much better guidance than WebMD in this context!

Have her die of consumption. Especially good if brought on by evil spirits and her daughter returns to the church because of it.

Jeff