⠀ BERNARD FISHER: THE SURGEON WHO SAVED THE BREAST For 75 years, breast cancer meant the Halsted radical mastectomy. Breast, chest muscle and underarm nodes, all gone. In 1957, Bernard Fisher, a Pittsburgh surgeon, was ordered to an NIH meeting on breast cancer. He wasn't interested. He went anyway, and got hooked on how cancer spreads. In 1967, at 48, he took over the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast Project. His theory: breast cancer is often in the blood by diagnosis, so cutting more doesn't save more. Fellow surgeons called it dangerous. In 1985, two of his studies in the New England Journal of Medicine settled it. Lumpectomy worked as well. He died Oct. 16, 2019, at 101. Women could finally keep what surgeons once took.