Introduction: Overview, History, Terminology and Early Clinical Experience

The history of the search for effective cancer treatment is probably as old as the history of any formal medical practice. However, apart from crude ablative surgery without general anaesthesia, it was not until the discovery of general anaesthesia in the mid-nineteenth century that modern operative surgery, as we know it, could be developed. Thus, safe and painless operative surgery developed as the first significant advance in cancer treatment. Initially, use of operative surgery under general anaesthesia was usually complicated by a very high incidence of wound infection. The problem of wound infection was clarified and largely controlled by the discovery of offending micro-organisms by such great pioneers as Semmelweis of Hungary, Pasteur of France, Koch of Germany and the Scot Lister who was working in England [1].