Surgical treatment of a cancerous uterus

Surgical treatment of any malignant neoplasm can make sense only when the possibility of relapses is taken into account and everything that can be achieved by art to eliminate them or prevent them. This is a principle that modern surgery persistently applies in the development of surgical methods for removing neoplasms, no matter in whatever area it develops. The greatest development in this direction has recently undergone surgery for breast cancer. At present, there can no longer be any question of removing, in addition to the neoplasm, only enlarged and infiltrated or suspicious glands, it is not enough even to remove healthy glands: in the form in which the details of this operation were developed by prof. Kocher), Watson Cheyne) and others, the removal of all tissue in the armpit and in the circumference of the musculi pectoralis majoris is a condition, the need for which can hardly be discussed. In a word, the removal of those tissues in which relapses develop more easily and most often is a rule adopted by modern surgery. Therefore, the principles that guide modern gynecology in the surgical treatment of uterine cancer seem to be completely random and poorly understood: in many cases, not the tissues that are most dangerous in the sense of relapse are removed, namely those in which relapses appear only as a rarity, or an exception and which more than others resist him.