Preface:
In common with a certain small {number of other practitioners of scien¬tific medicine indifferent 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 legiti¬mate 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