Like Crile and Keynes, he, too, had lost faith in the centrifugal theory of cancer. The more he revisited Keynes’s and Crile’s data, the more Fisher was convinced that radical mastectomy had no basis in biological reality. The truth, he suspected, was quite the opposite. “It has become apparent that the tangled web of threads on the wrong side of the tapestry really represented a beautiful design when examined properly, a meaningful pattern, a hypothesis… diametrically opposite to those considered to be ‘halstedian,’” Fisher wrote.
