Cancer in an African Community, 1897-1956

In recent years it has become evident that the African population of Uganda has a very different pattern of site and type frequencies of cancer from that which obtains in Europe and North America.This has been established in the last decade, and it is of interest to establish if this is a stable pattern, if it has remained similar over a period of time, and if there is evidence of change in the pattern in view of the development of Uganda under Western modernizing influences.This bears directly on the long controversy of whether " cancer is a disease of civilization " or that cancer is a rare disease of " primitive" peoples.rhough the fallacies of the belief that cancer is a rare disease of primitive peoples have long been exposed (Willis, 1960) it still lingers in some quarters (Schweitzer; see Berglas, 1957), having been widely propagated by Hoffman (1915) and to some extent supported by des Ligneris (1927Ligneris ( , 1936)).Both these authors used the low ratio of cancer to total hospital admissions to support this thesis.Table I is modified from des Ligneris (1936) to show examples of such low ratios.It is of interest that more recent information from the Transvaal region (Higginson and Oettl6, 1960) has shown that overall cancer