The James Logan Courier

By Fred Tasker
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)
MIAMI — After a lifetime of Hollywood success, actress Farrah Fawcett had the misfortune to die from one of the rarest malignancies, anal cancer.

It's a cancer that struck 5,070 Americans in 2008, compared with 40,740 cases of rectal cancer, 108,070 cases of colon cancer, 184,450 cases of breast cancer and 215,020 cases of lung cancer.

It's so rare, doctors say, that many caregivers don't routinely screen for it and many patients don't notice it until it reaches advanced stages.
"Early on, the patient often doesn't feel anything or know anything," said Dr. Michael Hellinger, colorectal surgeon at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach. "As it advances, with rectal bleeding, a little lump, people sometimes think it's hemorrhoids."

From wikipedia:
George Ellery Hale (June 29, 1868 – February 21, 1938) was an American solar astronomer, born in Chicago. He was educated at MIT, at the Observatory of Harvard College, (1889–90), and at Berlin (1893–94). As an undergraduate at MIT, he invented the spectroheliograph, with which he made his discoveries of the solar vortices and magnetic fields of sun spots.

Read The New Heavens by George Ellery Hale, free from googlebooks.com.