Cancer, Beware!

The New York City Department of Public Welfare opened the first municipal cancer clinic in the U.S.

It is housed in the New York City Cancer Institute and is equipped with enough radium to cure 2.000 people, a room for fluoroscopy, a 200,000-volt apparatus for deep therapy, many other cancer-curing devices.

The clinic is particularly for those people who cannot go to private hospitals, and any impecunious person who suspects that he has cancer has but to drop in for free treatment. As far as resources are concerned, the clinic will have the City Hospital on Welfare Island behind it, and the use of some of that hospital's 12,000 beds.

Dr. Charles H. Mayo of Rochester, Minn., at the opening ceremony, said: "We are going to conquer cancer and rid the world of it, regardless of the cost." He declared that he did not know whether the cure would be effected through a serum or radium. His predictions were evidently for the former, for he declared that medicine could cure the ills of the nation--Congress, morons, lunatics, Harry Thaw and newspaper headlines.

Continuing, he said: "Civilization can be measured by the advance of medicine. King Tut's tomb has revealed a civilization as rich as ours in every way but one--medicine. Since then we have divorced religion from the cure of the sick, although some people still think they can pray to God to make them well and then fold their hands and wait to be cured.

"We have taught people to be clean, wiped out the filth plagues, the black death which killed every other person in London in 1350, and smallpox, which killed every tenth person in New York in 1800.

"Now we have on our hands the insane and the 22% of our population who will never reach eleven years in mental age. They will all vote, and the highly intelligent, 15%, who think they know more than their leaders, won't.

"People would rather see Harry Thaw than President Coolidge, and the newspapers with their big headlines constantly stir their readers to unhealthy states of mind."