Benign breast disease comprises a wide range of conditions which worry patients, which vex physicians, which are vastly more common than breast cancer, and yet which have to date received relatively little attention in the medical literature. It is therefore a particular pleasure for me to introduce the third edition of Hughes, Mansel & Webster’s Benign Disorders and Diseases of the Breast, a unique and classic work which fully succeeds in addressing this imbalance and builds on the substantial and well-deserved success of the first (1989) and second (2000) editions. The authors correctly decry the term ‘fibrocystic disease’, proposing instead that benign breast conditions are not ‘disease’ per se, but are instead minor.
