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Cancer has always been with us, but not always in the same way. Its care and management have differed over time, of course, but so, too, have its identity, visibility, and meanings. Pick up the thread of history at its most distant end and you have cancer the crab — so named either because of the ramifying venous processes spreading out from a tumor or because its pain is like the pinch of a crab’s claw. Premodem cancer is a lump, a swelling that sometimes breaks through the skin in ulcerations producing foul-smelling discharges. The ancient Egyptians knew about many tumors that had a bad outcome, and the Greeks made a distinction between benign tumors ( oncos) and malignant ones (carcinos). In the second century A. D.，Galen reckoned that the cause was systemic , an excess of melancholy or black bile, one of the body’s four “ humors，’’ brought on by bad diet and environmental circumstances. Ancient medical practitioners sometimes cut tumors out, but the prognosis was known to be grim. Describing tumors of the breast, an Egyptian papyrus from about 1600 B. C. concluded: “ There is no treatment. ’’
The experience of cancer has always been terrible, but, until modem times, its mark on the culture has been light，In the past, fear coagulated around other ways of dying: infectious and epidemic diseases ( plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever) ; “ apoplexies’’ ( what we now call strokes and heart attacks) ; and，most notably in the nineteenth century, “ consumption” (tuberculosis) .The agonizing manner of cancer death was dreaded, but that fear was not centrally situated in the public mind — as it now is. This is one reason that the medical historian Roy Porter wrote that cancer is the modern disease par excellence，”and that Mukherjee calls it “ the quintessential product of modernity. n
At one time, it was thought that cancer was a “disease of civilization”，belonging to much the same causal domain as “neurasthenia” and diabetes, the former a nervous weakness believed to be brought about by the stress of modem life and the latter a condition produced by bad diet and indolence .In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries，some physicians attributed cancer ——notably o£ the breast and the ovaries — to psychological and behavioral causes. William Buchan’s wildly popular eighteenth -century text “Domestic Medicine” judged that cancers might be caused by “excessive fear, grief, religious melancholy. “ In the nineteenth century, reference was repeatedly made to a “cancer personality，’，and，in some versions，specifically to sexual repression. As Susan Sontag observed, cancer was considered shameful, not to be mentioned, even obscene. Among the Romantics and the Victorians, suffering and dying from tuberculosis might be considered a badge of refinement; cancer death was nothing of the sort. “It seems unimaginable，” Sontag wrote, “to aestheticism” cancer.
41. According to the passage, the ancient Egyptians .
A. called cancer the crab
B. were able to distinguish benign tumors and malignant ones
C. found out the cause of cancer
D. knew about a lot of malignant tumors
42. Which of the following statements about the cancers of the past is best supported by the passage?
A. Ancient people did not live long enough to become prone to cancer.
B. In the past, people did not fear cancer.
C. Cancer death might be considered a badge of refinement.
D. Some physicians believed that one’s own behavioral mode could lead to cancer.
43. Which of the following is the reason for cancer to be called “the modern disease”?
A. Modem cancer care is very effective.
B. There is a lot more cancer now.
C. People understand cancer in radically new ways now.
D. There is a sharp increase in mortality in modem cancer world.
44. “Neurasthenia” and diabetes are mentioned because .
A. they are as fatal as cancer
B. they were considered to be “disease of civilization”
C. people dread them very much
D. they are brought by the high pressure of modem life
45. As suggested by the passage, with which of the following statements would the author most likely agree?
A. The care and management of cancer have development over time.
B. The cultural significance of cancer shifts in different times.
C. Cancer’s identity has never changed.
D. Cancer is the price paid for modem life.