OK, what’s the deal? I have no medical background, but I think that originally, the word “chemotherapy” was just a literal word–meaning “treatment with chemicals.” Technically, an aspirin qualified as “chemotherapy.” I guess it actually still does, although the word is seldom used outside of the specific use of treating cancer.
Now the questions:
When did the concept of cancer treatment by using drugs come about?
Between then and the coining of the word “chemotherapy” (over 100 years ago) was that the word used when describing “treatment by artificial drugs?”
Possibly the use of the word describing cancer treatment revived an old word that had fallen into disuse?
I’m glad someone brought this up. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross used the word in it’s original, everything-from-aspirin-to-Zoloft, sense in “On Death and Dying.” That was in 1969, so the change may have been within the last few decades. It will be interesting to see whether healthcare professionals still use the word in it’s original sense when talking to eachother.
In the seventies in a UK hospital we still used we still used a form headed chemotherapy in addition to the usual prescription chart specifically for anti-biotics (where it was important to complete a course) and for warfarin where dosage was critical. IIRC it was also used for benzodiazepines and any new and expensive psychotropic drug. By the printing the form dated from the forties.
Paul Ehrlich, sometimes called the father of chemotherapy, coined the German word “Chemotherapie” around 1900, which was borrowed into English as “chemotherapy” about 1910. At first the word was confined to the use of chemicals that could kill disease-producing organisms (bacteria, worms, etc.) without killing the patient. The first chemotherapeutic treatment Ehrlich introduced was the use of a chemical called “trypan red” (“Trypanrot” in German) to treat infection by trypanosomes, a sort of protozoan parasite.
It seems natural to me to extend the meaning to include treatment of cancer by use of chemicals that kill cancer cells without killing the patient. The earliest reference to cancer chemotherapy in the OED is 1957.
I’m not sure how the word came to denote any sort of treatment with chemcials even if it doesn’t kill anything. I never heard it used in such a general sense until a couple of years ago.
Here’s a 1952 “Life” magazine article that references chemotherapy as a treatment for leukemia. Most of the other refereces before the 1950s appear to be in the general sense of ‘treatment by chemicals’.
Damn, I’ve spent the last 13 years not knowing what “chemotherapy” originally meant, and if I had just read the SDMB thoroughly, I could have known it in 2003.
For interested zombies, "The Emperor of All Maladies" is recommended reading. Pretty much the world history of cancer, including a lot of the development of treatments for it.