Focus: Death: Successes and Struggles in the War on Cancer

摘要

Things have changed so much since I came into the field over 50 years ago. Morbidity was severe, patients survived. Take breast cancer, for example. Before, surgeons would take everything off the chest wall, they even opened the chest wall, nothing worked. You could go as wide and as deep as you wanted to, but it didn’t change the mortality. Originally, it was thought that solid tumors, like breast cancer, spread directly to the surrounding areas, and if you took that tissue out “en bloc” you’d be able to get all the disease eventually. But, actually, that was not the case. The cancer spread early through the lymphatic system and blood stream. It was really only surgically curable in a small number of patients.