Did people from the 18th century or earlier eras get cancer?
Cancer was known to early Greek physicians, this is why it has a Greek name. Cancer seems more common today, but really that is only apparent. Cancer tends to kill older people, and there are more older people around (in historical times many people died before they turned 50, so the cancers which take years to kill never got a chance to appear). Most cancers also produce a long term weakness in the sufferer. In earlier periods people whose immune system was weakened by cancer would have succumbed to a palsy, a fever, or an infection before the cancer had a chance to kill them. Paradoxical as it seems, the presence of a large incidence of cancer in a society shows that the society has relatively high levels of general health. In unhealthy societies a slow killer like cancer doesn’t have time to operate.
