Fibrous Tumor of the Breast

To the Editor.—I am writing in response to the article "Fibrous Tumor of the Breast" by Puente and Potel (Arch Surg 109:391, 1974). While the authors should be congratulated for delineating this entity, I, as a pathologist, take exception to their statement that the pathologist "limits himself to describing what he sees in a small fragment of tissue. He provides a descriptive name, but not a true diagnosis."

This attack on the pathologist is somewhat muted by the editorial comment by Dr. Haagensen: "The pathologist has a scrap basket into which he throws a whole series of benign lesions of the breast and labels it 'chronic cystic mastitis' or 'fibrocystic disease.' " The reason for this is that traditionally fibrosis of the breast has been described in textbooks of pathology as a variant of "mammary dysplasia" (here we go again, another confusing term!) or "fibrocystic disease." Thus, Kuzma¹ writes: