Question: cancer is a huge problem now but how was it first discorvered? what were the signs & symptoms of cancer when it was first discovered?

Marianne Baker answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Hey aaliyhajayne

The thing that first comes to mind for me is the name; cancer.
It means ‘crab’, in Greek I believe, and was named that because when people looked inside someone who had died and saw this mass of stuff inside their chest/belly, it looked like a crab-shape. I don’t know if that’s true!

Cancer often makes people lose a lot of weight and also suffer from fatigue (feeling really tired); there’s a mass of cells growing inside you that use up a lot of the body’s resources (a bit like a worm or other parasite).

It depends where in the body it is as to what the main symptoms would be.

People with blood cancers sometimes bleed excessively when they’re cut and/or bruise very easily.

People with a kind of brain cancer might lose the ability to move or speak normally, or their personality might change.

I hope that sort of answers your question!