Cancer under the Microscope
This chapter reveals how mapping was only one of the tools deployed to decode the ‘cancer problem’ in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Running parallel to the activities of Haviland, Moore, and Green, biologists, pathologists, and histologists took up the microscope with gusto and spawned a vibrant debate among cell theorists, bacteriologists, and parasitologists. This chapter thus traces the introduction of the microscope into the landscape of cancer theory and practice, explores the development of cell theories of malignancy, and interrogates the many and various ‘germ theories’ of the disease. It argues that despite their close relationship with the microscope and its scientific and progressive associations, all three theories appealed in part because they recapitulated and reframed very old ideas about cancer’s causes and characteristics.