In 1978, my mother, Barbara Harman, who was 58 at the time, had a lump removed from a breast at Queen Alexandra hospital, Portsmouth.
In June that year she was prescribed tamoxifen, the drug that had been recently championed by the pharmacologist Craig Jordan. She was told that it was a new form of treatment and received regular monitoring into the mid-1990s. The cancer did not return. She died 43 years later at the age of 101.
