Stanford Cade was born, the son of Samuel Kadinsky, a diamond merchant of St. Petersburg, in Russia in 1895, and assumed the name of Cade by deed poll in 1924.
He started medical studies in Brussels, but war drove him from Belgium and he went to King’s College, London, and won an entrance scholarship to Westminster Medical School, where he qualified MRCS LRCP in 1917. He obtained his English FRCS diploma in 1923 and was appointed to the staff of Westminster Hospital in 1924, becoming also Surgeon to the Radium Institute and Mount Vernon Hospital.
He was early interested in the use of regional anaesthesia, and delivered his first Hunterian lecture on this subject in 1925. A regular visitor to France, at the Radium Institute in Paris, he met Regaud and Lacassagne and became keenly interested in radiotherapy; he was instrumental in bringing this new form of therapy to Westminster Hospital, and became an expert in the combined therapeutic field of surgery and irradiation. He was responsible, with Arthur Evans and Ernest Rock Carling, in opening the Radium Annexe of Westminster Hospital in Hampstead in 1929 and the same year published The Radium treatment of Cancer, the second much larger edition Malignant disease and its treatment by Radium appearing in 1940. Enemy action in the war destroyed not only the publisher’s stocks, but also the blocks for the illustrations and even a consignment in mid-Atlantic. By now he was in the Royal Air Force where his energies and contributions earned him his knighthood and a CB. A third edition of this book, now in 4 volumes and entirely rewritten, appeared between 1948 and 1952.
Two further Hunterian lectures were devoted to his particular speciality within surgery, malignant disease, one on carcinoma of mouth and pharynx, the other on adrenalectomy in the treatment of inoperable carcinoma of the breast. His enthusiasm, knowledge and expertise in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer by surgery and irradiation, made him eminent in this field, not only in the United Kingdom but also all over the world, and his work was recognized by honorary memberships and overseas lectures in the U.S.A., Chile, France, Ireland and Greece. He was a dynamic teacher, a man of infinite energy and enthusiasm and a national leader. He was a brilliant diagnostician, both clinical and histological, and a most able surgeon.
In 1920 he married Margaret Hesten, eldest daughter of the late William Agate, Mus B, FRCO of Paisley, Scotland. He had three daughters, one of whom followed him into Radiotherapy. He lived for many years at 68 Harley Street. He was a most active member of the Royal Air Force, Royal College of Surgeons, the British Empire Cancer Campaign and many other bodies, not only during his active professional life but long after his retirement from the Health Service. He was an exceptional man of exceptional talents, but his outstanding characteristic was his tireless enthusiasm. He was a human dynamo.
F Dudley Hart
[Brit.med.J., 1973, 4, 54; Lancet, 1973, 2, 745; Times, 21 Sept. 1973, 17 Oct 1973]