My dissertation research is on the history of cancer in the 19^th century. I focus on the way that clinicians, surgeons, and pathologists used various frameworks and theories like cell theory pathology, emerging bacteriology, and evolutionary thought, to created different and varied ideas of cancer etiology and pathology. I aim to better understand how networks of knowledge between practitioners across Europe and North America adopted, transformed, and extended theories of cancer etiology by attempting to commensurate and place the disease within their particular medical discourses or theories of biological life.