Cancer and Contagion

In 1911 Peyton Rous, a researcher at the Manhattan-based Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, observed a "non-filterable" agent capable of transmitting tumors in chickens. Rous struggled to characterize the ambiguous nature of the agent, which appeared to be neither microbial nor chemical; but with the advantage of considerable hindsight the Nobel Foundation recognized his observations in 1966 as the discovery of the first tumor virus. Two years after his observations, the Rockefeller Institute's front office passed Rous an inquiry from Richard Boardman, a lawyer across the Hudson River in Jersey City. Boardman had read in the newspaper about Rous's discovery of a "cancer parasite" and was moved to write in the hope that Rous might settle an ongoing dispute between him and his wife, Dorcas Boardman.

Both Richard and Dorcas were concerned that there were cancer "germs" in the mattress that the couple had inherited after caring for Dorcas's aunt, who had died a decade earlier after a "long illness"— a common euphemism for cancer. Richard sought an answer for what he presented as his wife's concern that there was "the danger of communication of the disease of cancer … lurking in the use of" a mattress that had been "stained by the drain from the cancer." Richard was inclined to believe that the mattress was safe, not because he denied that cancer was infectious, but because he doubted that cancer "germs" could survive for so long in the mattress. Dorcas maintained that they might have survived. Yet her concerns were not so great as to prevent the couple from offering the mattress to members of their household staff. With Rous's guidance, the institute's business manager sent a reply, sympathizing with the "tyranny that germ theory may exercise over the imagination" and assuring Richard that while "it is usually impossible to prove a negative," in this instance there was no "danger of infection whatsoever."

In approaching the history of biomedical objects such as viruses, we may feel a strong temptation, rooted in our present understanding of these objects, to identify with the views of physicians and scientists. Rous's contributions to the virus theory of cancer, discussed in chapter 2, are well known to historians of science and medicine, but the Boardmans' concerns are not. Our first instinct is to regard the Boardmans' fears of cancer germs lurking in a mattress as misplaced, because they fall so far from the attitudes we have been trained to cultivate toward cancer. As one early twentieth-century textbook on cancer noted, although the idea that cancer might be contagious was "the oldest hypothesis of the origin of cancer," it was a hypothesis that "few competent observers" credited in the wake of advances in microbiology. From the perspective of later scientific observers, cancer viruses fit the mold of a classic "unpopular" theory later redeemed by new experimental methods. As Rous accepted the Nobel Prize in 1966, he attributed the record-setting fifty-five-year delay between his findings and his award to the "downright disbelief" that other cancer researchers directed toward his theories of viral carcinogenesis. Only the diligent work of a small number of experimentalists exorcised the theory's unpopularity.

However, taking the skepticism expressed by a small number of doctors and scientists as our guide to the associations between cancer and contagion throughout history can be misleading, no matter how much such views resonate with our own. Scientists, physicians, and laypeople addressed the larger problem of cancer through different "regimes of perceptibility," combinations of scientific and social practices that they used to make sense of the disease and its causes. Identifying, or failing to identify, a cancer virus using new experimental methods becomes meaningful only in reference to the importance ascribed to these results by others — the technology does not speak for itself. Moreover, different social and scientific factors can align to create moments of imperceptibility, where particular causes of disease are harder to study.

As the Boardmans' debate over their mattress indicates, the theory that cancer was a viral disease drew upon a deep reserve of public belief in cancer as contagious disease. That reserve exerted a powerful influence on how the public received scientific research on cancer viruses and tinged how cancer specialists approached the question of cancer's potential infectious causes. Although the laboratory techniques that Rous borrowed from microbiology struggled with the nature of viruses, the vehemence of the skepticism expressed by members of the oncology community was less about Rous's theory itself than about broader questions of how medicine would relate to laboratory science and public concern about cancer.

The association between cancer and contagion proved enduring and controversial precisely because it existed at the intersection of the different regimes of perceptibility created by the techniques of the laboratory, the practices of physicians, and the customs of the public. Preserving the tension between these perspectives is vital for understanding how cancer viruses traveled through early twentieth-century American society. We should follow the ways in which different individuals and institutions brought cancer viruses into being through their actions and habits rather than defaulting to one of those perspectives. Cancer viruses became tangible to different groups through perceptual regimes instantiated in personal habits, architecture, fundraising, legislation, and education. These regimes were shaped not only by clinical practice, hygiene, and laboratory analysis, but also by fears of death, concerns about professional authority, and hopes for a cure. Approaching the history of cancer viruses with the full range of these regimes in mind underscores that the development of our present understanding of cancer, contagion, and viruses was far from inevitable.

This chapter examines different communities as they approached the question of viral carcinogenesis — both before Rous's discoveries and afterward, as the hunt for cancer viruses continued — in the context of the expansion of laboratory-based microbial theories of disease associated with the so-called bacteriological revolution. In addition, it highlights how popular ideas about...