ABSTRACT
A total of 704 patients treated at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge by radical mastectomy between 1947 and 1952 were followed up for 25 years. They were divided into two groups: stage I and II (Manchester classification) and stage III. There survival was then compared with that of an age-matched cohort and the results were plotted on a semilogarithmic graph. Parallelism in survival between the breast cancer group and the normal cohort was not reached until over 20 years, at which point a population of patients ‘cured’ by surgery could be defined. This was less than 30% for the most favorable group.
