George Lenthal Cheatle

Sir George Lenthal Cheatle was a British surgeon who made important contributions to the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Born in Kent in 1865, he trained at King's College London and was taught surgery by Joseph Lister, whom he assisted in Lister's last operation, though he later became the first surgeon at King's College Hospital to use asepsis. He served as a surgeon to the army in the Boer War and as a surgeon rear admiral in the Royal Navy in the First World War. In 1920 he was the first to repair a femoral hernia from above the pubis through the preperitoneal space, an approach later known as the Nyhus procedure. Using very large whole-organ sections of the breast, collected over thirty-five years, he showed that Paget's disease of the breast reflects an underlying cancer, and he co-wrote the textbook Tumours of the Breast. He died in 1951.