Stephen Paget

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Stephen Paget (1855-1926) was an English surgeon, the son of the distinguished surgeon and pathologist Sir James Paget, who has been long credited with proposing the "seed and soil" theory of metastasis, even though in his paper “The Distribution Of Secondary Growths In Cancer Of The Breast”, The Lancet, Volume 133, Issue 3421, 23 March 1889, Pages 571-573, he clearly states “…the chief advocate of this theory of the relation between the embolus and the tissues which receive it is Fuchs…”. The paper by Fuchs is “Das Sarkom des Uvealtractus”, Wien, 1882. Graefe's Archiv für Ophthalmologie, XII, 2, p. 233. In his paper, Paget presents and analyzes 735 fatal cases of breast cancer, complete with autopsy, as well as many other cancer cases from the literature and argues that the distribution of metastases cannot be due to chance, concluding that although “the best work in pathology of cancer is done by those who… are studying the nature of the seed…” [the cancer cell], the “observations of the properties of the soil" [the secondary organ] "may also be useful”...