Secondary skin cancer in nineteenth-century Britain

Clinico-pathological data on secondary skin cancer are of current interest. This paper therefore reviews such data with special reference to nineteenth-century Britain. The old authors were interested in such diverse aspects of the problem of skin secondaries as the mode of invasion, the forms of presentation, the patterns of distribution, clinical diagnosis, microscopic diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Although skin secondaries were of serious prognostic import, all cases showing them were not hopeless.