THE CUT: William Halsted’s “radical mastectomy” was believed for much of the 20th century to be the best defense against breast cancer. This illustration in his 1894 paper on the procedure depicts the removal of large volumes of tissue around the tumor. It would be decades before the medical community would begin to replace the procedure with more-targeted surgeries, together with cell-killing methods such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy.WELLCOME COLLECTION
On May 28, 1889, a 38-year-old woman was placed on an operating table at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Patient L.S. was married, with ten children, and had a cancerous tumor occupying most of her left breast. That day, and in subsequent operations over several months, her surgeon, William Halsted, painstakingly sliced out not only the tumor, but the pectoral muscle behind it, and the lymph nodes in her armpit. Then, he grafted skin—likely from her thigh—to patch up the gaping wound.
The procedure was unprecedented in the U.S. Although records of mastectomy-like procedures stretch back to at least the second century A.D., American physicians typically considered breast cancer patients doomed from the outset, and prescribed ointments and other less invasive measures. But L.S., ...
