Breast cancer surgery: a century after Halsted.

In the early years of this century prevailing currents of medical opinion led to the imposition of surgery even more aggressive than the radical mastectomy proposed by Halsted to treat breast cancer. More recently breast conservation surgery has become established but is always flanked by additional local treatment, and often by systemic therapy. Studies conducted in Milan were the first to demonstrate that conservative surgery plus an adjuvant therapy such as radiotherapy is efficacious in treating small-size breast cancer. As the year 2000 approaches it has become clear that breast cancer is curable in a high proportion of cases and attention is turning to improving the aesthetic outcome of the surgery, and to investigating the biological and genetic factors that influence the disease.