Timeline of cancer treatment development

Okay kiddo, so a long, long time ago, before any of our grandparents were even born, people were getting sick with something called cancer. But they didn't really know what it was or how to treat it yet.

It wasn't until the early 1900s that doctors started to figure out what cancer was and how it worked in the body. They discovered that it was caused by cells in our body growing and multiplying out of control, which can be very dangerous.

They started trying different things to treat cancer, like surgery to remove the cancerous cells or radiation therapy to kill them. But these treatments were very harsh and often caused a lot of damage to the body.

It wasn't until the 1940s and 1950s that scientists discovered a new way to treat cancer: chemotherapy. This is when doctors give patients drugs that go through the whole body and attack the cancer cells wherever they are.

Since then, there have been many advances in cancer treatment. Scientists have developed new kinds of chemotherapy drugs that are more effective and cause fewer side effects. They've also developed new types of radiation therapy that can be delivered more precisely to avoid damaging healthy cells.

There have also been new types of treatments developed, like immunotherapy. This is when doctors use a patient's own immune system to fight the cancer cells. And there are even new types of gene therapies being developed, which can change the cells in a patient's body to stop them from growing out of control.

So even though cancer is still a very scary thing, there are now many more ways to treat it than there were a long time ago. And scientists are always working to find new and better ways to help people who have cancer.