Invasion and metastasis: a historical perspective

The idea that neoplasms grow, becoming unresectable through dissemination, which is initially loco-regional, and systemic only in a later stage, is historically at the basis of the radical surgery – where, by ‘radical’, the old surgery meant the complete removal of the tumor and, in practice, aggressive surgery. Halsted’s “radical mastectomy”, as well as many principles of surgical anatomy of the first decades of the twentieth century, obey to...