Innocent tumours

When I was a student I lodged with musicians. One of them was fascinated and horrified by my pathology textbooks, though by comparison with such books of past eras, they were, well, less pathological.

I was reminded recently of the days when my musician friend used to leaf through my books and cry out, “Oh no, look at that!” (and then search for something even worse) when I bought a copy of the third edition of Sir John Bland-Sutton’s Tumours Innocent and Malignant (1903) in a small secondhand bookshop in the spa town of Malvern. I bought it because it was inscribed by the author (to W Perry Briggs, …