| Description |
Findings can be given only for carcinoma and sarcoma. So few cases are represented in the malignancies of hypernephroma, lymphosarcoms, malignant melanoma, Hodgkin's disease and chorionepithelioma, that no standards could be derived in this study. Carcinoma forms 87.97% if all hospitalized cancer patients, and sarcoma drops second with 6.43%. Undoubtedly carcinoma forms the majority of malignant tumors. However, the scarcity of other malignancies over a ten year period seem to need some explanation. Altogether 2409 cases of cancer were studied. Sixty-four of these were designated as "growth," "tumor," or "malignancy, and could be put under no classification. It is interesting to notice that there were thirteen hospital deaths among these sixty-four cases. Probably a large percentage of these patients were diagnosed as having a malignancy when a benign tumor was present, or they had only the symptoms of a malignant growth. No tabulations were made for these patients. Information concerning them was too vague and scare to allow any certainty as their malignancy. Of the 2409 patients 1262 were diagnosed pathologically as well as clinically. That leaves about half of the patients diagnosed only by clinical methods. Beside the fact the carcinoma is the commonest of malignant growth, mistaken diagnoses occur as to type of malignancy, and many of the tumors are recorded as carcinoma when in reality they were other types of malignancy. These differences in classification were brought out in many of the pathological diagnoses. For this thesis, however, the clinical diagnosis was accepted even though unaccompanied by a pathological report, and the resulting distribution of types of malignancy appeared. |
