If soot, and not some mystical, numinous humor (à la Galen), caused scrotal cancer, then two facts had to be true. First, external agents, rather than imbalances of internal fluids, had to lie at the root of carcinogenesis—a theory so radical for its time that even Pott hesitated to believe it. “All this makes it (at first) a very different case605 from a cancer which appears in an elderly man, whose fluids are become acrimonious from time,” he wrote (paying sly homage to Galen, while undermining Galenic theory). Second, if a foreign substance was truly the cause, then cancer was potentially
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