By the era of Hippocrates in the 4 th century B.C., breast cancer was clinically recognized and described and Hippocrates considered that in many cases it was very important that one of his cardinal rules, Primum non nocere (first do no harm) be applied, since little could be done for the patient. Hippocrates establishes the use of the term carcinoma when referring to tumors "that spread and destroyed the patient "and advances a theory according to which cancer is determined by the excess of "black bile". Hippocrates (and after him many other doctors in the following 2000 years) tended not to treat the deep-seated or ulcerated cancers, because “if treated, the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time.”
About six hundred years later, Galen makes another classification describing “tumors according to nature” (the normal enlargement of the breast with female maturation or during pregnancy and "tumors contrary to nature" (benign and malign tumors). Galen also was the one who suggested the slight similarity between a crab and cancer.
During the Middle Ages the medical practice has been dominated by the concepts of Galen and Hippocrate. The Renaissance and the 17th and the 18th century brought a new perspective on the disease. The “black bile” theory of the cause of cancer has been disputed by an increasing number of physicians (one of the most important being Ramazzini) and the surgery of neoplasms appeared. There were written treatises on mastectomies for breast cancer some of them mentioning the dissection of regional lymph nodes. Ramazzini also attributed the high prevalence of breast cancer among nuns to their celibate life. This observation withstood the test of time.
In the nineteenth century the medical community and the scientists began to study cancer systematically and intensively. The anatomist Bichat is the one who extended the principles of Galen. Bichat (1821) described the anatomy of many neoplasms and is the one who suggested that cancer was an “accidental formation” of tissue built up in the same way as any other portion of the organism. Seventeen years later, Johannes Müller extended these observations through the use of the microscope. Although the cellular theory was just being formulated and little was known about the cell at that time, Müller demonstrated independently that the cancer tissue was made up of cells. Rudolf Virchow (1863), a student of Muller extended our descriptive knowledge of cancer; he came up with a number of theories that were later disproved but he was the first one who pointed out a relation between chronic irritation and some cancers.
As major advances have been made in biology, many advances have been also made in the study of cancer. In 1829, Recamier introduced the term "metastases" in his work Recherces du Cancer and described clearly how cancer spreads by metastasis. Another important advance in cancer study was the demonstration by Waldeyer (1872) that the metastases were the result of the fact that some cells from primary cancers infiltrated lymphatic vessels.Other important advances in oncology were based on the work of Novinsky (1877), Doven and Shimkin (1970) .