A little bit of cancer history
Cancer has been around for a long time – scientists think that even dinosaurs may have had cancer! We know from looking at the remains of Egyptian mummies that they suffered from cancer too.
The name cancer comes from ancient Greek. Cancer means crab. The Greeks thought that clusters of cancer cells looked like the legs of a crab!
One of the very first people to suggest a cause for one type of cancer was Dr Percivall Pott in 1775. In those days boys were employed as chimney sweeps and had to climb up into the vast chimneys and dislodge the soot. As you can imagine they were filthy, always covered in soot. Dr Pott noticed that many of these boys went on to develop cancer of the scrotum in later life. He suggested that something in the soot was causing the cancer.
At the time no one knew how the soot was causing cancer, but chimney sweeps were encouraged to wash more thoroughly. As a result fewer men developed this cancer. Around 100 years later scientists found the chemical in soot that causes cancer, proving that Dr Pott's observations were correct.
