and public health agencies have worked to promote the early detection and the early treatment of cancer, With respect to the breast, for instance, both patients and physicians have been urged to seek out the small asymptomatic nodules and to have those that are at all suspicious removed.
If this program of education has been effective, it will have resulted in tangible changes in the population of women being treated for breast cancer. Both the emphasis on placing breast cancer symptoms before the physician and the emphasis on the dangers of long periods of "observing" suspicious lesions will have acted to lessen the reported intervals between the detection and the treatment of breast cancer. T h e campaign for periodic examinations of supposedly normal breasts by the patients and their physicians will have resulted in the discovery of more cancers while they were small. This in turn will mean that even with a given amount of patient-physician delay, the cancers coming to surgery would have been smaller. By both mechanisms the average patient prognosis would be better in the 1950's than it was in the early 1940's.
To study these points, the data on the breast cancers seen in this center during the years 1950-1 955 inclusive were compared with the data previously published on the cancers seen in the years 1940-1943. T h e delays reported by the patients were tabulated, and some improvement was in fact noted in the later period. T h e size of the cancers found a t operation and the frequency and distribution o f node metastases during the 2 time periods also were compared. These figures too showed From the Breast Service and the Pathology Laboratories, Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases, and the