Sampson Handley

William Sampson Handley (1872 to 1962) was an English surgeon who influenced the development of cancer surgery, born on 12 April 1872 in Loughborough, Leicestershire, the son of a chemist. He trained at Guy's Hospital from 1889, qualified in 1895 and became an MD the next year, taking an interest in pathology as a route to becoming a surgeon, and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1897. At the cancer research wing of the Middlesex Hospital he studied how cancer spreads, found that breast cancer extends mainly along the lymphatics and coined the term lymphatic permeation. He became an assistant surgeon there in 1905, published Cancer of the Breast and its Operative Treatment in 1906, and won the Walker Prize of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1911. He was also a skilled abdominal surgeon, served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War and was vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons from 1931 to 1934.