Cancer in American In modern society cancer is the disease most feared by the majority of people throughout the world, supplanting the "white death," or tuberculosis, of the last century; the "black death," or bubonic plague, of the Middle Ages; and the leprosy of biblical times. Cancer has been known and described throughout history, although its greater prevalence today is undoubtedly due to the conquest by medical science of most infectious diseases and to the increased life span of humans. The study of cancer is known as the field of ONCOLOGY. In the mid-1980s nearly 6 million new cancer cases and more than 4 million deaths from cancer we