For decades now breast cancer tissue resection has been the primary method of choice for treating the disease, however this was not the case throughout the history of medicine. For centuries breast cancer was considered to be incurable via surgical approaches and that only early, low grade, lesions can be removed safely. Not until the 19th century, was there an evident increase in surgical therapy for the disease (mainly radical mastectomies) due to the teaching of Morgagni, in addition to completely redefining the etiological process of the disease by Le Dran. Currently, practitioners have achieved a very high level of proficiency in treating the disease via continues refinement of the aforementioned facts. This resulted in tissue and organ sparing local surgical approaches, including wide local excisions through para-areolar incisions and even skin and areolar-complex spearing mastectomies, which have long overpassed the unnecessary and primitive high morbidity approaches performed in the earlier attempts to treat breast cancer.
Key words: breast surgery techniques, breast cancer treatment, breast history
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