ABSTRACT
For over 50 years since Beatson’s original work on castration for metastatic breast cancer little had changed. The discovery of the sex steroid hormones of course provided a rational explanation for the therapeutic benefit of sugical ovarian ablation and led Haddow and his colleagues to experiment with synthetic oestrogens and Adair and Herrman to use androgens for advanced breast cancer in the early 1940s (see related references 1 and 2).
