The first drugs to treat cancer effectively were the hormonal and cytotoxic agents which appeared in the early 1940s. In 1896 the Glasgow surgeon, George Beatson, reported the remission of an advanced breast cancer in a young woman,following removal of her ovaries. In a parallel discovery, just over 40 years later, Charles Huggins, working in Chicago, showed that prostate cancer would regress following castration. Shortly before this, in 1938, Charles Dodds, in London, had produced a synthetic form of the female hormone oestrogen: stilboestrol. In 1941 Huggins showed that, stilboestrol could cause prostate cancer to regress, and in 1944 Alexander Haddow reported the successful use of the drug to treat women with metastatic breast cancer. At the same time, other pioneers were building on the First World War observation that the poison gas, sulphurmustard, caused shrinkage of lymphoid tissue, and a fall in the white blood cell count, as well as many other effects. In 1942 Goodman and Gilman, working at Yale, used nitrogen mustard, a derivative of
sulphur mustard, to treat a man with advanced lymphoma: his cancer briefly regressed.