Journalist’s courage courted controversy
I WAS interested to read Dr Jean Silvan Evans’ article on Sir Tom Hopkinson and Picture Post (Weekend Magazine, May 9). A highly controversial issue of Picture Post was published in September 1950, just weeks before Sir Tom’s editorship came to an end, and it had a strong Welsh connection.
The issue was devoted to an unorthodox cancer treatment practised by David Rees Evans from Cardigan.
The treatment, known as the Cardigan Cancer Cure, had been developed half a century earlier by his father and uncle in Penybanc and involved applying a potion to visible growths involving or close to the skin. It transpired later that the secret potion was essentially a caustic paste containing zinc chloride and possibly colchicine. Many anecdotal claims for efficacy had been made over previous decades, but this issue of Picture Post raised the treatment’s profile to a completely new level with its editorial stance and huge circulation.
The family were described as the “Healers of Cardigan”.
The evidence was compiled by a biologist with no medical training but who made astonishing claims of patients being “completely cured”. Accompanying photographs included a series showing apparent resolution of a breast cancer following repeated applications of the potion over several months.
An editorial in the following week’s British Medical Journal was highly critical of the quality of the evidence and concluded that “cancer curing” was “the most execrable of all forms of quackery”.
However, the then Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, set up a committee of eminent scientists and doctors so that the Rees Evans “cancer cure” might be “fully and fairly investigated”. This reflected public opinion as, for example, expressed by Mr Ritchie Calder writing in the New Statesman and Nation that: “One of the most courageous and debatable journalistic ventures of our times was the Picture Post investigation of the Rees Evans treatment of cancer... Tom Hopkinson, the editor, was showing courage also because he must have known that it would draw upon him the kind of virulent attack which the British Medical Journal made last week.”
The committee examined the histories of 38 British and American patients treated by Mr Rees Evans. It concluded that there was no evidence that his treatment was of any value apart from possibly having some effect on rodent ulcers (a near-benign form of skin growth). There was no indication to recommend further investigation.