“Breast cancer didn’t bring me to my knees, it bought me to my feet…”
Melissa Etheridge
I have often referred to William Halsted as the father of breast surgery. Perhaps I was wrong. Halsted established a standardised approach to breast cancer surgery with his iconic 1894 paper in the Annals of Surgery. His message was simple, to cure cancer you needed clear margins, even at the expense of healthy tissues. Less is remembered about Willy Meyer who published his own article about radical mastectomy in the New York Medical Journal, just 10 days later. Meyer was a different man in many respects to Halsted. Meyer was born in Germany, Jewish, trained in Bonn, worked at the Public Hospital for German Immigrants and was teetotaller. Halsted was born in New York, educated at Yale, worked at the famous Knick and was a cocaine and heroin addict. Their operations were almost identical, except that Meyer resected both the pectoralis muscles. Both men argued about the merits of their procedures for decades. In the end the published data showed a 3 year survival of 41% in Halsted’s 133 cases and 48% in Meyer’s 67 cases. #hardlydifferentatall #letsmakelemonade
Pen Paint and Scalpel 