PREFACE: In common with a certain small {number of other practitioners of scientific medicine in different parts of the world, I have long been in the habit of treating tumours of various parts of the body by medicines, and that with great success. When, a few days since, a young girl, whom I knew, was sent to a hospital for operation for a small mammary tumour that I am quite sure could have been cured by medicines, I felt it to be my imperative duty at once to bring my own views and experience more prominently to the fore, and the more so as our knife-men— our surgical carpenters—are waxing bolder and bolder every day, and the very excellences of aseptic and anaesthetic surgery are fast running legitimate medicine to the ground, and with it our common humanity. I have been in spare moments occupied with a larger work on the amenability of tumours, wherever situate, to medicinal treatment, but I have not time to finish it at present, and as I had prepared what here follows of Tumours of the Breast as its first chapter, I am sending this to the printer as a smaller independent work.

Of course this makes my present literary venture scrappy and rather disjointed, but I have thought the transcendental importance of the subject would overtop these defects of style and homogeniety. This much is explanatory merely. I have thought it well to give particularly my earlier and more difficult cases. They constitute a history of my gropings in the medicinal cures of tumours. I do this because they show the way in which I have come to light, and not because they are otherwise particularly instructive. 2 Finsbury Circus, London, E.G., July 9th. 1888. J.CQMPTON BURNETT