system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How advanced was cancer treatment in the early to mid 1900s?

The reason I ask is that I always thought it was more or less a death sentence (except for the more minor ones, such as basal cell) until around the 1980s.

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I was reading an article on the oldest living person though and it said that she survived pancreatic cancer in the 1940s, which I thought was WAY before they could even come close to treating a cancer such as that. Pancreatic cancer only has a 10% five year survival rate nowadays as it is, so I really don't get it.
gpt
It wasn’t at all advanced. If it couldn’t be cut out, or given a dose of radiation, you died.

Chemotherapy started being trial tested in 43, results were *published* in 46. It was an early form of chemotherapy, nothing like what you thin of now with modern drugs, and it wasn’t like it was a national trial with thousands of people. Other drugs started getting experimental licenses after that.

But the death rate was still phenomenally high. So before the publishing of the chemotherapy paper in 1946, it was just cutting it out or radiation, and chemotherapy would in no way have been widely available immediately after the paper was published. It would take several years for the findings to be accepted and expanded on.