Cancer has existed for all of human history. The earliest written record regarding cancer is from 1600 BC in the Egyptian Edwin Smith Papyrus and describes breast cancer. Hippocrates (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) described several kinds of cancer, referring to them with the Greek word καρκίνος karkinos (crab or crayfish). This name comes from the appearance of the cut surface of a solid malignant tumor, with “the veins stretched on all sides as the animal the crab has its feet, whence it derives its name”.

Galen stated that “cancer of the breast is so called because of the fancied resemblance to a crab given by the lateral prolongations of the tumor and the adjacent distended veins”.: 738 Celsus (c. 25 BC – 50 AD) translated karkinos into the Latin cancer, also meaning crab and recommended surgery as treatment. Galen (2nd century AD) disagreed with the use of surgery and recommended purgatives instead. These recommendations largely stood for 1000 years.

In the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, it became acceptable for doctors to dissect bodies to discover the cause of death. The German professor Wilhelm Fabry believed that breast cancer was caused by a milk clot in a mammary duct. The Dutch professor Francois de la Boe Sylvius, a follower of Descartes, believed that all disease was the outcome of chemical processes and that acidic lymph fluid was the cause of cancer. His contemporary Nicolaes Tulp believed that cancer was a poison that slowly spreads and concluded that it was contagious.

The physician John Hill described tobacco sniffing as the cause of nose cancer in 1761. This was followed by the report in 1775 by British surgeon Percivall Pott that chimney sweeps’ carcinoma, a cancer of the scrotum, was a common disease among chimney sweeps. With the widespread use of the microscope in the 18th century, it was discovered that the ‘cancer poison’ spread from the primary tumor through the lymph nodes to other sites (“metastasis”). This view of the disease was first formulated by the English surgeon Campbell De Morgan between 1871 and 1874.