THE SURGICAL THERAPY OF BENIGN AND MALIGNANT TUMORS OF THE URINARY BLADDER

During recent years a renewed interest in the treatment of bladder tumors has been awakened, and with the introduction of the more extensive use of endovesical operative procedures as well as with the application of radium, new vistas have opened. With those procedures that are purely palliative this paper will not deal. Its limits, broad enough, will be the purely surgical therapy. Perhaps it is premature to attempt to standardize therapy in this field. By those of us who are fortunate enough to see many of these cases such an attempt should be made, even though further experience may lead to many modifications of the statements that seem justified today. Moreover, I hope that the discussion which this presentation will lead to will contribute a great deal to the elucidation of the subject before us.

From a therapeutic standpoint, cases of bladder neoplasm usually present themselves in three definite groups: