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Then, later, when I came to New York, Mrs. John Dorr, the mother of Miss Kay Swift, was in Europe the same time I was and she told me one day that she felt a little lump in her breast. I said, “Oh, well, that can't be anything.” At that time there was no Cancer Society, public education at all, and I said, “Have somebody look at it when you get home.” The result was, not having had any pain at the time, that she waited a month or six weeks until she got to New York, and it turned out to be a cancer of the breast. And it is possible that that short delay may have made the difference between her living and dying. In any case, she died after about two years, really after a great deal of agony. This puzzled and infuriated me, because I found that so little had been done at that time about cancer.

Your total concern with pain and suffering and its alleviation, did it induce in you any thoughts of religion or anything of that sort.

No, I couldn't say that. I thought it was just a matter of human ignorance and oversight and lack of intelligent study and training and research. I was infuriated, but I couldn't believe that someplace or other somebody wasn't taking care of this on a large scale.

Mrs. Lasker, this was really advanced thinking, wasn't it?