Free Study Guide for Silent Spring by Rachel Carson - Book Summary

SILENT SPRING NOTES

CHAPTER 14 - One in Every Four

Summary

Living things have been fighting cancer from the earliest time. Hostile elements have always been present on the earth. Since nature changes very slowly, it has always eventually adjusted itself to the hostile elements, the cancer-causing agents. When people came along, the course of nature’s adjustment to cancer changed dramatically because people are the first species to create cancer-causing agents. Early on, these cancer agents were things like soot. Soot was produced in great quantities during the industrial era.

The first time people began to be aware of cancer was in 1775 when Sir Percivall Pott linked soot with scrotal cancer in chimney workers. After this discovery, nothing happened in the way of cancer research for another hundred years. People did notice that there was a prevalence of skin cancer among workers exposed to arsenic fumes in copper smelters and tin foundries and people realized that cobalt and uranium mine workers were subject to lung cancer. These cancers came about before industrialization came on full force. When that happened in the last quarter of the ninetieth century, people began to be more and more aware of malignancies related to industrial exposure. By this time, people had recognized about twelve causes of cancer. By the time of the twentieth century, cancer-causing agents had proliferated immensely. In only two hundred years since Sir Percivall Pott, the world had drastically changed. Now, exposure to poisonous chemicals didn’t just happen at work; it also happened in the home and on the streets.

The rate of cancer has rises dramatically each year of the twentieth century. In 1900, only four percent of deaths were caused by cancer. In 1959, the figure had risen to fifteen percent of deaths. Malignant disease is likely to strike two out of three American families. These deaths are not only among adults. Whereas cancer in children was unheard of in the early part of the century, by the mid-century, American school children die of ..............

Notes

Here the title refers the statistic that one in four people will get cancer. The chapter describes the medical search for the link between chemical poisons and cancer. In doing so, Carson lays out loads of evidence to show the dangers of a poisoned world. At the end of the chapter, though, she anticipates the........

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