Question: how did cancer get discovered?

Angela Stokes answered on 16 Nov 2014:

The earliest known descriptions of cancer appear in seven papers discovered and deciphered late in the 19th century. They provided the first direct knowledge of Egyptian medical practice and two of them contain descriptions of cancer written around 1600 B.C., and are believed to date from sources as early as 2500 B.C. Thats between 4500 and 2600 years ago! Cancer is not new!

Hippocrates who lived around 400BC described several kinds of cancer, referring to them with the Greek word carcinos (crab). This name comes from the appearance of the cut surface of a solid malignant tumour which looked a bit crab like – Hippocrates only described tumors on the skin, nose, and breasts because it the Greeks did not open up the body.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, it became more acceptable for doctors to dissect bodies to discover the cause of death.

The first cause of cancer was identified by British surgeon Percivall Pott, who discovered in 1775 that 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 cancer eventually spreads 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.