Vera Peters and the conservative management of early-stage breast cancer.

During the first three quarters of the twentieth century, radical mastectomy was an accepted and common procedure in the management of patients with early stage cancer of the breast. After a lifetime of thinking about and working with patients with early-stage breast cancer, Vera Peters presented and published, in the mid-1970s, a retrospective historical case-control study that demonstrated the lack of a survival benefit for radical or modified radical mastectomy as compared with more conservative surgery with lumpectomy. In the years that followed, prospective randomized studies confirmed her findings.